Descartes’ mechanism can in many ways be considered a precursor to biology, insofar as it strives to offer a materialist understanding of the functioning of the body. But later on, biology had need to free itself from the technological analogy, in order to exclude any kind of finalism: unlike the Automaton, the living is not only organized, but also autonomous. Conceiving the living as autonomous allows then the relationship between life and technology to be reversed: it is because the living being is autonomous, and then normative, that it possesses technique as an organ of its own body. This overturning leads from the figure of Automaton to that of Cyborg, which presents a strict continuity between organic and inorganic organs. However, Cyborg is no more autonomous than Automaton: an organism whose functioning is regulated by technology is in fact heteronomous. Automaton and Cyborg are then two apparently opposite epistemological figures, but they raise the same philosophical problem, that of the autonomy of the living being in its relationship with technology.