The Coming of the Borgs

摘要

You've seen them—in airports and on airplanes, on com-muter trains, in the supermarket, walking down the street, in cars, wandering around outside office buildings. You may even be one. That's right, the borgs have landed. Millions of them are among us. Maybe they're not as scary as on Star Trek, but they can be pretty unnerving nonetheless. For the non-Trekkers, "borg" is short for cyborg, a combination of person (or, in Star Trek, any sentient species) and machine. I recently read an article that expands the definition of borg, and now I see them everywhere. One borg incarnation are people inexorably merged with cell phones, often in the form of earpieces. Maybe they're not surgically implanted (yet), but on a recent trip, I noticed that some borgs didn't remove the earpieces even when the phones had to be disabled for flight safety. Maybe the people were wearing the earpieces, but it often looks disturbingly the other way around.