‘Meeting a real-life cyborg was gobsmacking’ says film director

But life post-antennae has not been straightforward – the film also reveals he’s received death threats, from people who object to how he has modified his body.

Harbisson touches on this in the film.

“For many years we’ve had different types of death threats, from people who really hate what we’re doing, because they think it’s anti-natural or anti-God,” he says.

“So they think we should be stopped.”

The threats caused the couple to relocate their home to somewhere new, its precise location a closely guarded detail.

Born says: “It’s such a shame… they’re very gentle people”.

But she adds that her film injects possible notes of caution into the issue of body augmentation.

Harbisson’s credo, which includes his own business interests, is: “Design Yourself.”

But Born wants to get people thinking about “security – and the hacking potential all of these things could result in”.

“There’s a safety issue in terms of who is doing it, what are the circumstances that they’re doing it under, and what are the possible outcomes or consequences?” she adds.

A 2022 survey by US think tank the Pew Research Centre, external, into AI and human enhancement, suggests the US public may have some reservations.

Those surveyed were “generally more excited than concerned about the idea of several potential changes to human abilities”.

But many were “hesitant or undecided” about the virtues of biomedical interventions to “change cognitive abilities or the course of human health”.