Cyberpunk

When reading of viewing anything from this genre, I constantly in an internal debate about what parts of this envision of the future will actually come to exist, and at what intervals they began to show themselves. It is obvious that most of these things will come into existence, but for me the question is at what point do they become too exaggerated by our excited 20-21st century selves to be applicable in a futuristic standing?

Take Johnny Mnemonic for example. This is a classical representation of human biology merging with our most up to date technology. Our result is a half human half machine being that can go above and beyond to answer the call of duty (we are assuming that he was made for good work...this is not always so). Our intentions with this merging (in this case, secure data storage) are usually for the best, but it never seems to work out that way, does it?

What usually gets in the way of this half human half machine working to our intended desires, is the uncontrollable element of the human or bionic aspect. What was different with this particular story was that the data seemed to function separately from his own brain. Usually we see them merge and the human inhibitions slowly become influenced. In this case, it was just the mere presence of priceless stolen data existing in human flesh that caused a problem.

I feel like the merging of humans and artificial intellegence is unavoidable and it is the vital part of this genre that creates validity in its own predictions. It is obvious that we will want to improve ourselves and judging by our own course of history, we will only slightly hesitate to do so.