The Reluctant Cyborg: On Disability, Science, and Technology
This past January, I began a new job at Saskatchewan polytechnic in Saskatoon. It’s a brand-new position, and at the time I’m writing this, I’m still figuring out exactly what my job is. It appears to be an evolving combination of teaching, administration, and departmental cheerleading. I teach classes. I process transfer credit requests. I help vet new instructors. I support not just my colleagues at Sask Polytech, but at regional colleges across Northern Saskatchewan.
I am the only Deaf person in the department, and none of my colleagues know American Sign Language. In our online meetings, we use automatic transcription, or captions, for me to understand them. Sometimes they forget to activate the captions in Zoom, and we have to stop the meeting before it begins and create another meeting room with activated captions. If I meet my colleagues in person, I use Live Transcribe, the transcription app on my phone, to understand what they’re saying. The words appear on my phone in thick white letters, the rhythm skidding and thudding, as though the words are being stamped into place.
The same goes with most of my family and friends. Neither my parents nor my brother use Sign Language, nor do my mother- and siblings-in-law. My boxing coach has uploaded Live Transcribe to her phone, shifting the accent to account for her Scottish brogue. Apart from my wife and members of the Deaf and Signing community, virtually all my interactions are filtered through technology powered by artificial intelligence.
No captioning platform is one hundred percent accurate. Each interaction in which I use either online captions or my phone app inevitably generates some kind of word salad, forcing me to decipher or clarify what the speaker is saying. Sometimes, and especially in situations where more than one person speaks at once, clarity is impossible.
I save the more confounding and bizarre word salads on my phone, thinking I can one day make poetry out of them, but in reality they are a kind of anti-poetry. These captioned interactions are ungenuine, unnatural. They are mitigated: technology is as much a barrier as it is a bridge, a mediator with a microchip. They make me feel distant from my fellow human beings, even as they bring me closer to them.
In these instances, I become a kind of reluctant cyborg.
Excerpt of dinner table word salad—
Saskatoon, SK—October 22, 2023
partner to come out in the hall Khorfakkan strip of young, the team leader, heard her yelling animal, and then. How much of a T is it they need to be banging in mars needs to go what does it do? What does it’s not severe it’s like hilarious when she was like. Tell me the TV.
This condition of cyborgism, and the complicated relationship with science and technology that attends it, is hardly unique in the disability community. Disabled people around the world experience it as a kind of absurd liminality: the world is not built for us, so we use whatever means available to navigate it. (The absurdity stems from the looking-glass quality that often arises in our interactions with nondisabled people; it’s like two different realities colliding.) Any disabled person who uses a wheelchair, prosthetic, audio guide, screen reader, adaptive keyboard, or other technological means of navigating the world might be called a cyborg. Artificial intelligence is a large part of this: according to disability advocate Imani Barbarin, AI is used in medical and accessibility technology, as well as helping with early detection of cancer and other illnesses. The Cree musician, writer, and filmmaker Christa Couture uses a prosthetic leg and describes herself as a cyborg. Jillian Weise, a prominent disability advocate, also calls herself a cyborg, stating that “Cyborgs can be any disabled person whose body is technology.”
I’ve been a reluctant cyborg almost all my life. From age six to age eighteen (and then again in my late twenties and early thirties), I wore hearing aids. In elementary school and high school, I wore an FM system, where my teacher would speak into a microphone and her voice would travel via radio signal directly into my ears. I’ve watched television with captions since I was six. I didn’t start learning American Sign Language until I was thirty. A high percentage of my lifetime, interfaces have been processed through accessibility technology. Unless it’s in Sign Language, every conversation I have carries with it the discomfort of absurd liminality: I don’t know if I will fully understand, and even if I do fully understand, I seldom connect with the person I’m speaking to. That discomfort will never leave.
In my memoir Voice, I wrote about how being Deaf has influenced the way I see the world. I discussed how conversations are spontaneous, amorphous creatures that can grow in any direction. My conversations with hearing or non-Signing people never feel spontaneous and amorphous. Everything is structured, contained. There’s an edge of self-consciousness for both the speaker and me. People check themselves when they speak with me. To a point, this added awareness is good, because they’re more aware of their words and can tailor their speech in a way that makes it easier for a microphone to pick it up, thus helping me understand, but it also reduces our ability to connect person to person. The speaker goes on their guard and becomes more inhibited. I see it in their body language: they straighten. They stiffen. I do my best to look the speaker in the eye and create a safe, comfortable place for them to speak, but I have to read my screen to see what they’re saying. It can be off-putting to people who regard eye contact as a key to trust and connection. Also, as a writer, I’m interested in people: their facial expressions, their gestures, their tics, their styles, their motivations. It’s difficult for me to observe people when I have to watch their words plod into place on a screen.
I am only realizing this as I type these words:
Accessibility technology has muddled my humanity.
Excerpt of dinner table word salad—Merritt, BC—July 5, 2024
There might be a chef that you see evening. Awesome two pros. Go to the bottom fast measurements 5000 you do yeah accumulation of fish. Pizza one of the OK so I’ll see if the school is on here one of the first jobs that we’re gonna do big job is on this Friday I think exactly but it’s fish extraction fish salvage so piece of equipment we use called electro Fisher. It’s like Ghostbusters backpack and what you do is actually electricity in water and what is it waves. Electricity anti-term is Galbani taxis, but in these waves electricity, it goes across the fishes body and it paralyzes them but what you could do is I don’t know about you would beings maybe never tried it but you push it along and it’s all it is high voltage push along nonconducting pull out.
Cyborgism presents a truth familiar to many disabled people: technology is not a cure. It is a tool. Hearing aids and cochlear implants do not cure Deaf and hard-of-hearing people; they amplify sound. Wheelchairs do not cure paraplegics; they are a means of mobility.
Many nondisabled inventors have taken it upon themselves to try and “cure” certain disabilities. One example is the BRO stair-climbing wheelchair, manufactured by Swiss company SCEWO, which looks like a mix between a small tank and a Black Mirror robot and is available for 32,850 Swiss Francs, or $51,977.77 CAD. (The chair is not always covered by insurance.) Another notorious example is the sign language glove. Different iterations of this glove have been created since 1988. The basic idea is a computerized glove fits onto the hands of someone who uses Sign Language and then translates their signs into an oral language. The problem, of course, is that this glove was invented for hearing people, not for Deaf people. (It is also, like the BRO chair, prohibitively expensive: for instance, the BrightSign Glove manufactured in the UK is available for $3,734 CAD.)
While these inventors may mean well, they ultimately miss the point and, in some cases, end up doing more harm than good: the thinking behind such inventions is that accessibility is an individual responsibility, rather than a social one. “I worry that the cyborg is too much of an institution,” writes Weise, “an illusion of the nondisabled, the superhero in the movie.” A paraplegic is supposed to find a way to climb stairs instead of using and advocating for ramps; hence the stair-climbing wheelchair. A Deaf person is supposed to cater to hearing people by learning to speak orally and read lips; hence the sign language glove.
In other words, disabled people are seen as flaws in need of correction, rather than as fully fledged human beings who have just as much right to exist as anyone else.
This attitude is consistent across much of the scientific community, particularly in technology and medicine. Medical professionals are taught to correct disabilities. We are problems to be solved, and, sometimes, solving these problems means throwing them away, which in Canada means recommending medical assistance in dying (MAiD), a move that has disproportionately targeted impoverished disabled people. Bioethicists such as Peter Singer have openly advocated for the elimination of disabled people. Tech leaders such as Elon Musk are embracing eugenicist thinking: a January 2025 Mother Jones article labelled him a “techno-eugenicist,” while Rolling Stone highlighted his and his supporters’ use of “the r-word,” an outdated and ableist term used in the past to justify, among other things, institutionalization, sterilization, and extermination; the word is now making a comeback, and as an exclamation point, Musk made a Sieg Heil salute during Trump’s inauguration, irrefutably drawing a direct connection between himself, Trump’s administration, and Nazism. On top of all this, the COVID pandemic is still ongoing and still disabling hundreds of thousands of people. Disabled people around the world scream about the science—the infection rates, the death tolls, the mutations, the complications from Long COVID—yet the world by and large now denies its existence, and by the time this piece is published, it’s possible that bird flu (or another virus) will be more widespread.
In Politics, Aristotle wrote “let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.” In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin advocated for natural selection, which in human terms has been interpreted to mean leaving behind anyone unfit and unable to keep up with the group. This type of irresponsible thinking is baked into humanity; we have not progressed beyond it for thousands of years.
Is it any wonder, then, why disabled people are suspicious of technology and medicine?
Who or what are these bodies of knowledge meant to serve?
Excerpt of research interview word salad—Martensville, SK—November 4, 2024
I’m not sure if you’ve heard destroy up and goes train and yeah yeah yeah and why has nobody written about that think that there’s no specific type of local that would be poor right like Saskatchewan that. I’m not sure I’m I’m. I’m not done opportunity to experiment do different things so I’m hoping that the affection becomes styling for people just so you know 3030 is yes. Thank you, thanks that’s great. Wait wait.
A fully accessible world meets disabled people on their terms. It listens to them rather than imposes on them. It is governed by empathy rather than arrogance. Science and technology cannot solve what is not meant to be solved. If we aspire to become an evolved society, we need to evolve morally and socially in step with science. Darwin’s treatise focused on animal evolution and highlighted humanity’s animal origins. If we wish to continue progressing beyond our animality and become fully realized human beings, our moral selves must evolve. Technology must serve as it is meant to be: a tool, rather than a replacement or a correction. Our advancements should not be restricted to science and technology; we must recognize and renew our responsibilities to each other and to the planet. It is a familiar yet crucial truth: personal growth and development are too often sacrificed for the sake of technological convenience. Creating space for disabled people is a moral endeavour that engages with virtually all bodies of knowledge: art, architecture, fashion, industry, environmental studies, science, technology.
Cyborgism is a survival technique. Being a cyborg is okay, because it allows me to survive. Nothing will ever be perfect. As Weise writes, “Maybe this feeling of trial and error, repetition and glitch, is part of the cyborg condition and, by extension, the disabled condition.” For many disabled people, cyborgism is a means of connection. Their technological tools do not diminish or detract from their humanity; they allow them to express their humanity.
I want to connect with people. I want to experience excitement as a conversation wends and whirls in unexpected directions. I want to know people without the captions, without the technological interference. I love my Deaf self. I have no interest in being corrected. I wish that my colleagues and family knew Sign Language so I could know them more. This is partly why I’m a writer: I have to imagine such conversations. I have Deaf friends, but they’re scattered all around the world, and because I don’t experience unmitigated connection enough, I have to dream of what real connection looks like. I have to dream my own humanity into being and share it through my characters.
For me, being a cyborg is okay.
I’d much rather be a human being.
Photo graciously provided by Gaelle Marcel from Unsplash.
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