Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/11/captain_cyborg_goes/

Captain Cyborg goes on a lecture tour

Extending gibberish to our Europeans cousins

By Kieren McCarthy

Posted in On-Prem, 11th June 2001 09:52 GMT

Captain Cyborg aka Kevin Warwick, professor of a made-up science at Reading University, is to spread his peculiar brand of sci-fi fantasy and gibberish masquerading as serious research to Switzerland.

That's right. So impressed with Kev's Royal Academy lectures were the bods in Geneva running the NetFinance show, that they've gone and booked the phoney for the opening gambit on the second day.

It's called "Man And Cybernetics: A Glimpse At The World Of The Future". And this is Kev's depressingly daft introduction: "I was born human. But this was an accident of fate - a condition merely of time and place [uh-huh]. I believe it's something we have the power to change. In August 1998, a silicon chip was implanted in my arm [a reed switch under the skin for one day]. The trial demonstrated how the principles behind cybernetics could perform in real-life applications [okay].

"Will we evolve into a cyborg community? [No] Linking people via chip implants to super-intelligent machines seems a natural [?] progression - creating in effect superhumans. There appears to be absolutely nothing to stop machines becoming more intelligent, particularly when we look towards an intelligent machine network. There is no proof, no evidence, no physical or biological pointers that" I'm not talking out my arse - sorry - "that indicate that machine intelligence cannot surpass that of humans."

Yes, Kev - despite the efforts of the educated few - is still selling books on the back of his "research" and weird cyborg fantasies. The Christmas lectures he gave for the Royal Academy have given him even more credibility. The old lies have also resurfaced: "He has published over 350 research papers" says the blurb. He hasn't. About 20, in fact.

He's become again the "leading prophet of the robot age" and "appears in the 1999 Guinness Book of Records for an Internet robot learning experiment". Now we hadn't heard that one, so we'll get right on to disproving it.

We blame ourselves. The sheer tedium of keeping up with Captain Cyborg made us lower our guard. We haven't written about the god-awful lectures and so they have gone passed unchallenged. We also failed to front Mr Warwick when he was within biting distance - something that may now haunt us for years to come.

Fellow rational humans, we are sorry to have loosened the snare just when Captain Cyborg was suffocating himself. We won't make the same mistake again. ®