My life as a cyborg

Kevin Warwick does not mention whether he got himself any tattoos when he was a teenage biker in Coventry. But if not, he has certainly made up for it in adulthood, just as he made up for his early departure from school with a fast-track academic sprint that won him a professorship in cybernetics at Reading University when he was 32.

Earlier this year, he got himself a body modification that showed up tattoos and piercings for the Iron Age techniques they are. He had an electronic pickup surgically implanted into a nerve on his arm, enabling him to be plugged directly into a computer.

Hard-core body-piercers use their inorganic additions to stand out from the crowd. Kevin Warwick uses his temporary implant to claim that he is not just ahead of the crowd, but of the whole species. During the period of the experiment, he boasts, he became the world's first cyborg. The rest of humankind will have to follow in his footsteps, he warns, or be relegated to a "sub-species", "the chimpanzees of the future".

For Warwick, a cyborg is a human-machine system which improves upon natural capacities. For some critics, a person riding a bike meets that criterion. But despite his superficially disdainful attitude to the body, Warwick is captivated by the magical idea of getting under the skin. He feels mighty when he uses his implant to make a robot hand move when he moves his own - and his underlying fantasy comes into view. Warwick dreams of making things happen just by wishing. Scratch the cyborg and you'll find the inner child.

You will also find all sorts of possibilities for transforming the lives of people whose nervous systems are impaired. During the implant experiment, Warwick perceived signals fed into his nerve by an ultrasound detector. If such a system could be perfected, it could act as a substitute sense for blind people.

But although Warwick became aware of medical applications in the course of the project - and, as he candidly acknowledges, when trying to get the operation past the ethics committee - what really excites him is the idea of adding a new sense to those which nature has already evolved.

The Reading Ubermensch has found it easier to win publicity than popularity, but how much that troubles him is unclear. His priorities are strikingly displayed in I, Cyborg, which appears to include the name of every journalist he has ever spoken to, and every last appearance on Sky News. He seems similarly untroubled by the questions his claims beg. Above all, he does not even start to explain why connecting humans and computers should produce the new kind of intelligence he predicts. However powerful computers get, they show no sign of becoming anything more than giant calculators. They have their way of thinking, and we have ours. It will take more than surgery to bring the two together.

What's really off-putting about his attitude is not the hype, or the message that humans are obsolete, but the Philistinism. He dismisses philosophy, and is entirely oblivious to neuroscience. Although he describes himself as a scientist, he shows no sign of having any feelings for nature.

When he contemplates the most complex thing we know, the human nervous system, his reaction is that it could do with an upgrade. A neuroscientist might retort that we can hardly upgrade what we don't understand. Still, it could all just be a wind-up. When he includes day return tickets to the Milky Way in his closing science fiction scenario, dated 2050, he seems to be tipping us the wink that cyborgs are for entertainment purposes only.