Okay, I can see that, but that's been said about the printing press and literature as a whole. ANything extra-somatic to how we learn and remember data, really.
Isn't a smartphone closer to a portable encyclopedia and message service than it is to an extension of ourselves?
My self is pretty solid without it. As opposed to taking away my cyberarm or cyberheart.
People often claim a great relief to be separated from their phones - if you've ever travelled to remote locations, without cell service, that's what you hear after the first day or two of reflexive phone-checking.
Mind you, that does mean that any addon could be claimed to be non-cybernetic.
Do you think non-implanted machines make us cyborgs? If so, how does a motorcycle not make you a cyborg?
I think it depends on how you look at it. I don't think anyone means all that technology literally makes us cyborgs in the sense that sci-fi terms them, but they're more talking about either our overdependance on technology or how it shapes our behaviour and perception. Leaving prosthetics aside, which are developing at a very slow pace... what if cyborgs never really happen? I see it troubling that people turn to cyberpunk or sci-fi in general for anything more than probably some degree of speculation, more of a prediction and if it doesn't come true or it doesn't come true in a certain span of time or in this or that order, then it's no longer valid (I can see though how it may be fun -or annoying- to spot the parts where a work of sci-fi is dated, but not how it invalidates it).
At the end of the day, I think cyberpunk is in fact sci-fi because we usually turn to it for cool sci-fi ideas, only maybe we like them more in cyberpunk because they're somehow more realistic or relevant to us, but all the tech, the flashy stuff and the action, while cool, is superfluous and frivolous. There has to be something more that we can apply in the here and now about their stories and their worlds, and all good cyberpunk (and sci-fi again) works have this. They don't have to be cautionary warnings for something that may not even happen.
Let's compare, and yes, I know I'm monothematic, GITS SAC with all of the recent Hollywood flicks with a bit of cyberpunk that use certain tropes just for the sake of being relevant. GITS is a world where the mind (the ghost, the electrical experience of the natural brain) and the machine interact, the mind is software and the brain is hardwarwe, and where people's minds can be hacked to implant memories or make people act like they wouldn't do, interfere in their perception of the world or even change their ideology. While that's cool, and that's what makes people turn to GITS, that's the frivolous element. That may never happen and we may have been lost in a diatribe of a non-problem if cyberbrains or cyborgs never exist or if computer science has nothing to do with that. But then, amidst the cases of ghosthacking we have people who start acting a certain way not because they have synchronized their thoughts through cybernetic neural itnerfaces, but by more traditional means: being exposed to biased information, being too eager to believe things that are comfortable to us... that's not something that may happen in the future, that's something that has always happened but the series shows it in an exagerated manner.
Now let's compare it to films like the Robocop remake, Ironman 2 or Captain America: The Winter Soldier. All of them deal with drone warfare to seem relevant in a sci-fi/cyberpunk package... but they don't answer any relevant questions. They simply perpetuate misconceptions about the drones and pose us non-problems like drones being controlled by AI that choose who lives and who dies or combat drones patrolling first-world streets, while there are legitimate and relevant concerns that are wiped under the rug. If the message of these films is "we can't let computers decide over life and death and control drones", "we can't bring combat drones to America" or "we can't trust some ex-soviet guy or ex-nazi guy to build our drones" then it's like the movies are telling us "we're on the right track", because this is not happening now and it's probably never going to happen. It's a conformist message. The problem with drones is more of an old one, the dehumanization of the enemy, because drones are controlled by human pilots remotely and some of the reality and weight of the actions may be trivialized by this.
We could also say that drones keep the troops safe, as the users aren't physically there exposing themselves, but their targets and collateral victims aren't any safer. Again, somewhat old problem, only exagerated. You can compare them to the atom bomb or go as far as you can draw analogies.
