Are homo sapiens a cybernetic life-form?

[MonstersFromTheId]

Homo sapiens:
A cybernetic life-form, native to the third planet from a medium sized star.
Primary food sources:
Petroleum oil
Ferrous metals
Water
Trace amounts of organic material


O.k. so I'm kidding, but only partly.
Consider; how many of us would starve without the technology we use to produce, store, and distribute, the food required to keep the billions of us there are alive?
What do you suppose we consume more of as a species - wheat, or oil? Steel or beef? Water or toilet paper?
I really don't know myself, I don't even know where I'd go to find out, or even how something like that should be counted. But I do strongly suspect that without the massive monocultures of wheat tended and harvested by fairly complex machines, the trucks and highways that form what at this point really could be viewed as a massive circulatory system, without the warehouses, and the telecommunications used to determine what winds up where and when,.. there'd be a hell of a lot fewer of us.

So the question becomes - at what point does making distinctions between ourselves and our technology become a more or less meaningless distinction in classifying our species?
...
Over the long pull, how many of you believe that it's pretty much inevitable that humanity probably is going to wind up a truly cybernetic life-form?

How many think we're already there?

Monsters

 

[selfAdjoint]

So we're all going to turn into Robbies? (I do love your handle!)

If we could stand to lose 99.9% of us we could go back to subsistence agriculture any time. Or hunting - some people do that already. Up in my neck of the woods there are individual bowhunters whose entire yearly protein comes from their kill. Of course they depend on freezers - hence on electricity...

 

[MonstersFromTheId]

So we're all going to turn into Robbies?

Clickity-click-click-CLACK!
Yes sir. That possibility would be consistent with all rellevant parameters likely to effect the evolutionary development path currently observed sir.


"Robbie" STILL, to this very day, gets my vote as the best dammed robot character film ever produced.
...
"Of course they depend on freezers - hence on electricity..."
But even without freezers it probably wouldn't take 'em long to start smoking or salting the meat you know?
Maybe those people are nature's way of takin out insurance on this whole monkey with too big a brain come cyborg experiment. ;-)
"Never bet more than you can afford to loose?"

Monsters

 

[Dayle Record]

We are already, ambulatory internal combustion engines. We made the first simple batteries in the Babylonian era, that we know of. We made the first simple engines because we could not even come close to understanding the complexity of the engines we are. We created engines to serve our engines, we are gifted with this physical interface form, well yet, beyond our understanding.

We have not grasped some of the most fundamental aspects of our tenure here, so it represents no evolution to change into less complex machines, simply because we don't understand ourselves.