"At some point, you'll look down at your character's hands and say 'wow, my hands are metal all the way up to my elbows? Well, that's kind of creepy, it feels k

"At some point, you'll look down at your character's hands and say 'wow, my hands are metal all the way up to my elbows? Well, that's kind of creepy, it feels kind of wrong'." The article doesn't really dig into any of Pondsmith's thoughts here, but to my reading, Cyberpunk's fantastical body-modification tech is very much intended as a mirror of our real technology. We've all been wired in with cyberware for the past decade; we just didn't notice because the hardware stays in our pockets instead of under our skin. But the effect has not been entirely different: We are now persistently linked to our contacts wherever we go; we can instantly look up contextual information whenever the need arises; we can store anything from a date and time we need to remember to an entire scene of sight and sound, all in an external extension of our memories that can be called up almost as quickly as the ones in our heads. Smartphones made us all cyborgs, just ones with lower-bandwidth implants.