Stefan Sorgner’s We Have Always Been Cyborgs is a more conservative book than it seems. It advances a bioconservative, ‘cishuman’ approach to transhumanism that might have met the approval of Julian Huxley, who coined ‘transhumanism’ in the 1950s, but would be seen as too limited by the people who revived the movement in the 1990s. In particular, Sorgner stresses the biomedical side over the artificial intelligence side of cyborganization. Indeed, his arguments tend to be dismissive of the latter’s aspirations, which I argue is likely to put him on the wrong side of history, given how science and technology has radically reshaped our sense of both who we are and what is possible. In addition, Sorgner fails to take seriously the emergence of ‘cyborg rights’ movement as a ‘posthumanist’ phenomenon.
