Cyberpunk and Steampunk: Ghost in a Shell (3 Points)

 The official prompt for this week is to discuss what ideas about the extension of humanity through technology are explored in the work you read?

The first obvious correlation of the preservation and prolonging of human life in these type of sci-fi stories is almost always the ability to transfer human consciousness into an artificial body that doesn’t consist the same needs or go through the same decaying process and the human body does; which is through becoming cyborgs. 

Most sci-fi media talking about this theme usually focus on how it can make human life easier and more enjoyable through the help of cyborgs but then something dark happens that ruins that utopian society or turns the cyborgs against them. This is the dynamic of humans vs cyborgs and artificial intelligence; you reap what you sow. This fear of our own creations turning back on us has spawned since at least the idea of retro-futurism. The manga touches a bit on that but I feel like it mostly focuses on the humanism of the cyborgs and robots themselves. The working title Ghost in the Shell is referenced many times throughout the novel, as our robotic characters reference their inner thoughts or, in a way, their soul as their ghost. This gives the cyborgs more life to them, and grounding them in the human world to feel closer to humans than people think.

Giving our main character, Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg who is the team leader of Public Security Section 9 of the police force, human emotions and thoughts and appearances with being a cyborg helps us as readers be able to sympathize with them; they have comparable human problems even though they aren’t human. Even sexuality and sexual indulgence seem to be a minor theme; being able to feel physically and emotionally as something humans don’t deem as real or capable to have human emotions. We see the humans as the source of the problem despite them making cyborgs, to begin with. Humans have taken up unnecessary space and overuse the world’s resources and just destroy and bring harm to the world with their selfishness.