We're already cyborgs: assistive tech is the real transhumanism

When people talk about transhumanism, they picture the future: brain implants, robotic limbs, uploading your mind to the cloud. Billionaires taking supplements to live to 150.

Meanwhile, right now, someone is reading this article with a screen reader at three times normal speed. Someone else is navigating with their eyes, or with a single switch, or by voice, while their hearing aids stream audio straight from their phone.

The cyborgs are already here. They're our users. And a lot of what we ship doesn't work for them.

Where "cyborg" came from

The word was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, in a paper called "Cyborgs and Space." Their idea was practical, not science fiction: instead of building an Earth-like environment around astronauts, why not adapt the human body to survive in space with the help of technology? A cybernetic organism. A body extended by machines.

Twenty-five years later, Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) turned the figure into a critique: the line between human and machine, natural and artificial, was never as clean as we pretended. We were already mixed.

Transhumanism kept the dream of enhancement: technology as the next step of human evolution. As an anthropologist, what interests me is less the future body than the present one, and a question transhumanism tends to skip: who gets to be enhanced, and who gets left behind?

Assistive tech is body modification

Glasses, hearing aids and cochlear implants, wheelchairs, prosthetics, screen readers, voice control, eye tracking, switch access, live captions, magnifiers. All of these extend a body so it can do something it otherwise couldn't, or couldn't easily.

The WHO estimates that around 1.3 billion people, about one in six, live with a significant disability. Add aging, temporary injuries and situational limits (a broken arm, a loud room, bright sun), and "augmented user" stops being a niche. It's a large share of your audience at any given moment.

Here's the catch: an extension only works if the world is built to receive it. A screen reader is useless on a page made of unlabeled <div>s. Voice control can't press a button it can't name. The cyborg body is ready; the interface often isn't.

What breaks the extension

Most failures are boring and fixable:

<!-- A screen reader announces: "button." Which one? -->
<div class="btn" onclick="pay()">
  <svg>...</svg>
</div>

<!-- Now the extension can connect -->
<button type="button" onclick="pay()" aria-label="Pay $250">
  <svg aria-hidden="true">...</svg>
</button>

The most common ways we cut the connection:

• No semantics. Clickable <div>s and <span>s instead of <button> and <a>. Assistive tech can't see them as controls.
• No names. Icon-only buttons without aria-label. Voice control users can't say "click Pay" if nothing is called Pay.
• Keyboard traps. Modals you can't leave without a mouse. Focus that disappears.
• Timeouts. Sessions that expire while someone is slowly navigating by switch or by eye.
• Motion and auto-play. Carousels and animations that ignore prefers-reduced-motion.
• Captchas and gestures. "Drag the slider," "pinch to zoom," "tap the traffic lights." Each assumes a specific body.

Who gets to be a cyborg

Transhumanism has an inequality problem, and so does assistive tech. A high-end hearing aid or a modern power wheelchair is expensive. Eye-tracking setups cost a fortune. Many people rely on the free, built-in tools in their phone: VoiceOver, TalkBack, Voice Access, Live Caption, zoom.

That makes our job more important, not less. When the built-in extension is the only one someone can afford, an inaccessible app doesn't just inconvenience them. It shuts them out entirely.

The same thing happens on the hardware side. If your web app needs the latest phone to run smoothly, you've drawn an economic line around who can use it.

Designing for extended bodies

A few practices that treat assistive tech as a first-class user:

1. Use native elements first. A real <button>, <a>, <label> and <input> give you keyboard, focus and screen reader support for free.
2. Name everything. Every interactive element needs an accessible name a human would say out loud.
3. Test with the extensions themselves. Turn on VoiceOver or TalkBack for 15 minutes. Navigate your app with only a keyboard. Try Voice Control. It's humbling, and fast.
4. Never require one specific body. Every gesture needs a simple alternative: a button for every swipe, a code option for every biometric.
5. Give time. Warn before timeouts and let people extend them.
6. Respect user settings. Text size, contrast, reduced motion, captions. They're the body's preferences, sent to your interface.
7. Budget for low-end devices. Performance is accessibility for people who can't upgrade.

The future is already here

Clynes and Kline imagined cyborgs surviving in space. Haraway said we were cyborgs already. Transhumanists dream of the enhanced human of tomorrow.

I think the more interesting work is today's: making sure the bodies already extended by technology can actually connect to what we build.

The augmented human isn't a future user. It's the person trying to use your checkout right now.

This piece grew out of an essay I wrote during my master's on the body, transhumanism and culture. It's part of my series on the human side of interfaces, and a follow-up to "The body is the first interface."

Do you use any assistive tech yourself, or build with it in mind? I'd love to hear what breaks most often.

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References

• Clynes, Manfred E., and Nathan S. Kline. "Cyborgs and Space." Astronautics, 1960.
• Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto." 1985.
• World Health Organization. Global report on health equity for persons with disabilities. 2022.
• W3C. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2.