I see. I thought by “enhanced” you just meant really intelligent humans–humans who were smart enough to manage the machines–and as technology gets more and more complicated, it will take more and more intelligent humans being to manage it–to the point where they are so intelligent, they aren’t human any more.
But the cyborg concept makes a lot more sense.
Well, what you’ve painted there is one possible scenario, one possible direction in which technology may evolve. I can see it maybe happening–sure–but if the question is what do I think will happen, I’d have to express a bit of skepticism about that scenario (it seems too fantastical to me).
The way I’m imagining this topic–the way I read the OP–is in terms of machines taking over human jobs–you know, like factory workers having less and less work to do because bigger and better machines can do the work faster and cheaper. Picturing how human cyborgs fit into that is little difficult–although I can imagine some scenarios–for example, why not surgically implant bionic tendons into one’s limbs in order to move heavy object more easily, or to shovel dirt faster, but that seems such an erratic option compared to simply buying dumb stand-alone machines.
But of course, the labor market is not the only context in which we can talk about machines taking over human beings. We could talk about athletics. Hell, certain unscrupulous athletes already cheat by taking steroids and other performance enhancing drugs–why not integrate bionic technology into their bodies to make them run faster, jump higher, throw longer, hit harder, etc. Or what about simple lay people interested in the prospect of ESP abilities–it’s possible, in principle, to communicate telepathically if only we could figure out how to integrate microchips into the human brain, thereby converting neuro-chemical signals into digital form in the microchips and from there into radio signals traveling through the air to be picked up by a recipient microchip in someone else’s brain.
So I can see that; the question is, can such technology go so far as to completely replace humanity? Or will such a turn in our evolution be its own undoing, our own arrogant conceit deluding us into believing we know where all this is going and that we can control it, but in reality we’re just fucking ourselves up to the point of going crazy and ultimately killing ourselves? Or maybe it’s somewhere in the middle. Maybe humanity will eventually consist of those who refuse to take any part in the transformation (granting the free world continues to respect the human right to make such a choice), those who do take part in it (the cyborgs, the bionic men and women), and maybe even those who completely reconstruct themselves so that there isn’t even a trace of their prior humanity left in them (perhaps, for example, someone who chooses to upload his/her whole psyche into a machine replica of his/her body and then dispose of the organic original).