Captain Cyborg, fresh from filling the Swiss' ears with garbage has popped over to the emerald isle, our spies tell us, in order to prop up his existence as a visionary and academic.

The sad thing is that the Irish Times, rather than simply throw Kevin Warwick (for that is his real-world name) out of the building and put him on the next boat back to Blighty, has gone to the trouble of writing a story about the troubled man.

Understandably confused with his title "Professor of Cybernetics", it headlined the nonsense "Academic plugs himself into age of cyborg".

So what new lunacy did Kev come up with for his next media outlet? Sadly, very little. It's still the same old guff about cyborgs taking over the world and claiming that the reed switch he popped in his arm for a few days is some kind of evidence of it.

He did of course come up with a ludicrous soundbite with reference to how cyborgs will treat humans in the future. "You have evolved further than a chimpanzee. So would you vote for a chimpanzee? As a cyborg, would you do what a human tells you?" He obviously wasn't on form.

The most interesting aspect though was his dragging out of the second chip experiment - which, according to how he feels on the day, will enable him to record and playback brain impulses, cause telepathy, give his wife an orgasm, and so on.

Now, Kev has been going on about this experiment for at least a year and it has paid dividends in terms of media coverage. But but but: when is he actually planning to do it? We scoured through our Captain Cyborg archive but he has never pinpointed a date.

This is, of course, due to the fact that there is no way in the world that it is ever going to work. Even Captain Cyborg will have trouble fudging the results when he has made such a big thing of it.

However, he has always said that he will do the experiment this year - that being 2001. According to the Irish Times "next November he plans to have a chip implanted in his arm, which will link his nervous system with a computer, to investigate how his movements - and, possibly, his emotions - can be remotely controlled by a computer".

In the office we've argued about whether "next November" means November 2001 or November 2002. Opinion is divided. Is Kev attempting to put the experiment back by a year - by which point he will probably have written another book filled with sixth-form philosophical ramblings and unjustifiable assumptions?

We wait to see. ®

Related Link

Irish Times talks tosh

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