Augmented: Life and Death As a Cyborg

A provocative rethinking of the intersection of death, technology, and disability, for a better life.

We are all cyborgs, relying on technology—whether it’s Alexa, a pacemaker, or a titanium knee—for our quotidian existence. In our deep connection to a technological world, from robots to augmented and virtual realities, metaverses, and gaming, Candi Cann sees an opportunity, and good reason, to question our ideas about accessibility and inclusion. In augmented, she asks us to reconsider traditional notions of biology and death.

Having relied on hearing aids from the age of four, Cann uses her experience to challenge readers to reconsider their assumptions about technologies and their role in life—and death. She also focuses on what it means that most of us are living longer with the intervention of medical technologies, and how a better understanding of our relationship to technology will grant us greater control as we age. Drawing on her life experience in Asia, the author explains how cultural and religious views of machines and artificial intelligence vary globally—in particular, how a Western fear of machines contrasts with an animistic worldview that can see machines as conduits of care for others, embedding spiritual possibilities.

Former Fulbright Scholar, Candi K. Cann is a professor at Baylor University with a research focus on death, dying, and grief, and the intersections of marginality, diversity, and death technologies.