'Meeting a real-life cyborg was gobsmacking' For the past 20 years, self-declared cyborg artist Neil Harbisson has provoked debate with his eyeborg - a surgically attached antenna. Harbisson, who grew up in Barcelona, is colour blind, having been born with the rare condition achromatopsia, which affects one in 33,000 people. This means he sees in what he calls greyscale - only black, white and shades of grey. But he decided to have surgery in 2004 which changed his life - and his senses - attaching an antenna to the back of his head, which transforms light waves into sounds. When film director Carey Born came across Harbisson, classed by Guinness World Records as the first officially recognised'cyborg', she was gobsmacked and astonished.

One color-blind artist has had an'eyeborg' antenna implanted directly into his skull to enable him to'hear' color - and his friend has had implants in her feet to allow her to'feel' earthquakes. The two are'transhumanists', a growing movement of people who hope to add new abilities to their bodies using technology - with Elon Musk claiming that technology such as his Neuralink implant could enhance human memories or even allow humans to live forever as man-machine hybrids. The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has sparked a new interest in the idea of surgically modified humans. In a new documentary due out this year, Cyborg, Neil Harbisson, who is the world's first legally recognized cyborg thanks to his color-hearing implant, says, 'This is happening!' and hopes that technology will allow humans to'self-design' their bodies. Neil Harbisson, the world's first legally recognised cyborg thanks to his color-hearing implant (First Born Films) Hrbisson advocates for'non-human' identities (First Born Films) Director Carey Born said that she had heard of a'cyborg' who had been surgically altered to hear color, emailed Harbisson and decided to make a documentary about'transhumanists' - believing it's important that the tech doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

The cyborgs are upon us. Turns out, they're more'enhanced reality' and less'science fiction.' In 1998, Professor of Cybernetics Kevin Warwick had a chip implanted in his body that would open electronic doors and turn on lights as he passed. In 2002, he had a 100 electrode array wired into the nervous system of his arm to allow him to remotely control an artificial hand. Performance artist Stelios Arcadiou (who has changed his name to Stelarc) has spent 10 years growing an artificially-created ear that is surgically attached to his left arm. In 2009, Jerry Jalava, a Finnish computer engineer who lost part of a finger in a motorcycle accident, turned his prosthetic finger into a USB drive.

But some transhumanists hope to slowly morph into "immortal cyborgd" with endlessly replaceable parts. Did you recently welcome a child into the world? An upstanding responsible parent such as yourself is surely doing all you can to prepare your little one for all the pitfalls life has in store. However, thanks to technology, children born in 2014 may face a far different set of issues than you ever had to. And we're not talking about simply learning to master a new generation of digital doohickeys, we're talking about living in a world in which the very definition of "human" becomes blurred.

Contrary to envisaged fears that emerging technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) will put a lot of humans out of jobs, SAS, a global technology solution company has said the computerised system if well applied, will create more jobs and help improve human efficiency, using data analytics. The information on the role of AI in business growth was revealed at the SAS Road to Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence Workshop, which held in Lagos on Tuesday. Senior Business Solution Manager, Advanced Analytics and AI at SAS, Mr. Larry Orimoloye, argued that emerging technology like AI was actually transforming businesses creating more jobs and enhancing business efficiency. According to him, in a customer operation centre where humans are responding to customers' complaints, a lot of training and investment are being put into in to enable the staff respond accurately to customers' needs and challenges. However, he pointed out that this is something that machines like robots can easily do because they have been programmed to do so and they have the intelligence to it accurately.

Earlier this year I went to an event in Austin, Texas, billed as a sneak preview of the evolution of our species. The #Bdyhax Conference, which took place in a downtown exhibition complex, promised a front-row insight into the coming "singularity" – that nirvana foretold by science fiction in which biology and technology would fuse and revolutionise human capability and experience. The headline acts of the conference were mostly bodyhackers – DIY experimenters who, in their basements and garages, seek to enhance their own flesh and blood with biometric implants and cognitive enablers. These brave pioneers were extending their senses, overcoming physical limitation, Dan-Daring themselves and the rest of us into the future. At least that was the idea. The reality of the convention was a little more mundane. It was overpriced and sparsely attended. Disparate and awkward groups of the pierced and the tattooed wandered between lectures about the ethics of body augmentation, and budget demonstrations of virtual worlds, past stalls flogging various kinds of neurotropic snake oil or enthusing over the transforming possibilities of magnets and LED lights inserted under the skin.

There is a huge amount of pressure on healthcare services today with much written about the resulting impact on patient care. You only need to reflect on the recent election campaign to see what an emotive issue it remains throughout the UK. What's also true is that advanced technology is taking a bigger role in healthcare than ever before, looking to alleviate some of the burdens on our health systems and provide greater support for our wellbeing. One clear theme underpinning this shift is applications. Whether being used by organisations to adapt and streamline processes to improve data access and patient care or by patients themselves looking at ways to better understand and manage their health, the sector is set to be transformed by the evolution of apps.

A new breed of human is on its way. Transhumanists are a group who seek to accelerate the evolution of humanity through science and technology. Oliver Pickup investigates the movement, the implications for humankind and asks, is it morally wrong to augment humans? The world's preeminent'cyborg artist', Neil Harbisson (pictured above), has been stopped "several times a day, every single day, since March 22, 2004". It's impossible for him to forget the date: that Monday, 13 years ago, he had an antenna fixed to his skull in order to'hear' colour.

Given the amount of criticism IoT security faces, should embedded tech really be a reality? With the rise of the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence, many unique innovations have been unveiled across various industries and the field just keeps growing. The two industries may be in their infancy but they've already helped with the creation of a new category called Artificial Sensors. At the annual SAS Global Forum, Artist and Cyborg activist Neil Harbisson delivered a keynote discussing his Cyborg project which has enabled him to develop artificial sensors that are embedded into the human body to transmit senses. This began with himself in 2003, when Harbisson became the first person to have an antenna implanted to his skull.

My latest book is a thriller and it is science fiction, but it is also known as what is called a genre smasher, and so I felt it was time to address the cyberpunk body hacking grinders in Cyberwar. I hate labels, but sometimes they are necessity when it comes to easily finding information. Without the fantastically fun sub-genre of speculative fiction known as'Cyberpunk', it would be pretty damn hard to find new books that I like that in some way loosely resemble the technologically gritty woes of imagined futures or worlds or realities brought to us in stories like Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the neighbors will have your balls if your robotic sheep proves to be impersonating a real one) or William Gibson's unparalleled Neuromancer. It occurs to me, right now, as the horrid commercials blare their noise at my back, while I eagerly await my Alma Mater's first entry into the March Madness Tournament, that my book has been marketed wrong. That is, to say, Cyberwar meets the expectations for a sci-fi thriller, but that is far short of the whole picture.