Uplifting News

It's as weird as you imagine. Glasses are technically cybernetics, if only because they are a prosthetic. Clothing, glasses, through pocket watches and wristwatches and hearing aids all the way up through smartphones and even into Extended Reality (AugReal and VR) all count as "proto-cybernetics" or "pseudo-cybernetics" or "quasi-cybernetics". In short, a tool that you wear.

An internal implant can be properly cybernetic; most such implants are not because the intent is to repair existing organs like bones or heart valves rather than replace. A peg leg does count as cybernetic, but most internal implants are, you know, internal. Like a full mechanical heart replacement, or at least a pacemaker (which is technically an enhancement, a normally-absent "plan B" to save the life of someone with a malfunctioning Central Nervous System or other coronary issue).

All of this is susceptible to a scary-sounding-but-mostly-harmless practice known as "bio-hacking". Bio-hacking is based on the viewpoint that the human body is technically public domain hardware/software, and that each person has dominion over their own body when it comes to medical experimentation. While biohacking can be a risk, examples that I could recommend are wearing a glove with a magnet in the tip of one of the fingers (you'll eventually start sensing subtle magnetic fields nearby), and lucid dreaming (oneironautics is essentially the "hamburger which is a genre of sandwich" to biohacking's "sandwiches are an entire genre of food"). So far, not a single instance of biohacking has been used on unwilling participants outside of preexisting scientific disciplines corrupted by authoritarian governments; individuals can and (IMO) would be well off to experiment on themselves in sane and safe ways, though I'd always recommend discussing it with a doctor to be sure there is no severe health risks.

Oneironautics alone, while not actually related to cybernetics (at least, not directly) is the most awesome and has the lowest barrier to entry of all biohacking possibilities. No implantation is required, only a desire and belief that lucid dreams can, in fact, happen. Just remember, your unconscious will not hurt you, it wants to help and always has helped. The only reason nightmares and such exist is because it reacts to your fears and stresses by showing you your problems, but if you do not want it to hurt you, it will not hurt you. Just try to talk to it, you might be pleasantly surprised!

So yes, there very much is a blurry line between "cyborg" and "ordinary person". The gameplay side of Cyberpunk 2077 is somewhat more accurate than you'd think, IRL if cyberpsychosis were to happen it would be not from over-replacement but a result of tapping into the Central Nervous System in ways that cause permanent sensory damage.

Additionally, I'm no doctor but psychosis is the medical term for hallunations, it's barely even related to psychopathy. I have no idea how the implication of cyberpsychosis being a form of psychopathy could work IRL but I'd say it's unlikely that anyone would be able to prove such a link to begin with. Corporate propaganda aside, people should and do blame car-centric infrastructure for ruining Western civilization, but originally the reason it was unnoticed was because the symptom (overuse of smartphones) was itself a compounding factor and the original cause of traffic jams (inefficient use of space) had never been seen before. "Cybernetics cause psychosis" doesn't mean "cybernetics cause psychopathy", it means "cybernetics make you hallucinate things not there". That means cybernetics are making users panic, not become a form of cybernetic monsters. They'd be scared, unless the corps solved their own problem by (at minimum) providing the real reason cyberpsychosis could affect anyone and how to avoid letting yourself hurt anyone around you. That at least keeps people buying more cybernetics than the bare minimum and is also the truth.

Actual cyberpsycopathy, if I were to write it, would involve a chip damaging the prefrontal cortex in such a way that their moral inhibitions disappear. However, psychopaths cannot actually fake emotion like in the movies. They have no empathy because they have no feelings, only free will and curiosity. As any mad scientist in fiction (or, say, in the employ of a certain horrific historical dictator between 1939 and 1945) might show, curiosity with no morals can lead to some very disturbing actions being taken, but people with psychopathy are not usually ever allowed power over another person's fate.

Cybernetic sociopathy is what I'd call it, except that is best equated to anti-social individuals, either from sociopathy or acting on misanthropic beliefs, who limit all their interaction with other individuals to being over the internet. Disruptive, but not the mass-murderers seen in fiction.

I think cybernetics are going to be designed with ethics and absolute security in mind going forward. Neuralink was a wakeup call to the medical community that the genie will not stay in the bottle forever, and efforts to make cybernetics meet the much more rigorous requirements of the human body and of human morality need to be the top priorities. Corporations will object, but I urge you not to let them have the primary say. Doctors and patients need to put their foot down and say that cybernetics must be the sole legal property of the individual it is attached to.