It was a big month for scientific primates. On April 8, Elon Musk’s startup Neuralink announces that they have created a cyborg monkey that MindPong can play with a brain chip. The following week, scientists from the Salk Institute in California revealed that they had successfully grown human-macaque embryos in test tubes. These hybrid babies were aborted at 20 days.
The ethical implications of such experiments are now discussed with a resigned shrug. There is a sense of inevitability in it all. Powerful people will indulge themselves in any behavior that is pleasant and possible. What could be more enjoyable than playing God?
The practical question is not how to stop them, but how to survive in their technocratic time. Where do we draw such boundaries? Do we reject the terms and conditions of the technology? Or, if it’s our turn to jump off a bit, do we take the plunge?
Ultimately, these are religious questions. Many traditional cultures regard living things as sacred. Every being is endowed with a spark of consciousness and thus deserves dignity, even those who kill and eat us. From this point of view, the basic composition of any living thing is a form of blasphemy, especially in the case of humans.
To materialists – common in Silicon Valley – an organism is merely a collection of cells and chemical signals with nothing but a ‘soul’. In their self-conception, these innovators simply take part in nature’s relentless march from steam engines to smartphones to cyborgs and beyond. Many of them view pain and suffering as mere brain signals on a flickering monitor. For them, the pleasure of progress is a much higher priority.
Monkey Cyborgs: Just Another Sign of the Times
Musk’s built-in primacy is celebrated as a major breakthrough in cyborg technology. The overall system is pretty simple. Neuralink scientists have trained a nine-year-old macaque, Pager, to play Pong and other puzzles on a computer screen using a joystick. Every time the monkey makes the right move, a metal tube sprays banana smoothie into his mouth.
All the while, Pager’s brain was scanned by two Neuralink chips stuck in his skull. More than 2,000 wires blow out in his gray fabric, watching his motor cortex as he swings the joystick and sucks off the banana smoothie. After the monkey’s neural activity is correlated with its on – screen performance, the researchers pull out the joystick.
The cursor kept moving. The monkey was playing a video game with only his brain waves. Maybe it’s just me, but the cursor seemed to move more smoothly when using the Neuralink slide.
According to Musk’s stated ambitions, this breakthrough is just a springboard to insert Neuralink chips into human skulls, thus fusing our cognition with artificial intelligence. In the hyper-competitive world that threatens just beyond the horizon – when AI has overcome the human mind – a brain chip can be seen by many as merely a way to keep up in the gear race.
Neuralink’s monkey is just the latest chapter in a long history of animal-machine hybrids. Twenty years ago, the Northwestern University of Chicago unveiled the first vertebrate cyborg. In that experiment, scientists cut a lamprey’s brain out of its head, kept the brain alive in a nutrient solution, hooked the wires to its visual and motor cortical brackets, and stuffed the sentimental organ into a small machine as large as’ a hockey. The visual cortex of the eel was connected to light sensors and the motor cortex controlled the wheels of the device.
Researchers have placed this fresh cyborg in a dark space. They flashed lights on one side of the room and then on the other. Because bulbs orient themselves on light coming through the ocean surface, the brain-controlled hockey turns and turns to the light wherever it shines. The creature buzzes back and forth and tries desperately to orient itself.
Two decades ago, publications such as CNN and the Washington Post responded with suspicion and moral concern to such progress. Today, they describe the rise of technocracy with a mixture of awe and shameless product placement, if at all. If they look at Musk’s cyborg macaque, they see a bright future where the lame will walk, the blind will see, and dumb will think like super-intelligent machines.
Planet of Man-Monkey Hybrids
Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte and his joint American-Chinese team at the Salk Institute announced on April 15 the successful fertilization of human-macaque chimeras, a term derived from Greek mythology. In Homer’s “Iliad,The chimera had a lion’s head, a serpent’s tail and a goat’s body, and it blew fire.
Today we see myths becoming reality. ‘Chimeras’, created in Promethean bio-laboratories around the world, are hybrid creatures whose stem cells come from several species. This effort has been going on for more than five decades. At that time, scientists created, among other things, viable rats / mouse hybrids, a sheep / goat and a crippled quail / chicken. More recently, the Salk Institute has designed pig hosts that grow healthy human lungs.
The way it works is simple. Lab technicians take a fertilized embryo (like a macaque) and then add the stem cells of another organism (such as a human). They carry the resulting entity in vitro – or preferably, in utero – then stand back to watch the “magic” happen.
Among the stranger results is the mixing of behavioral tendencies. One good example is a classic mouse hybrid. Scientists have mixed the stem cells of a turbulent species with a more comfortable variety. The behavior of the offspring grown in the laboratory was somewhere in between.
When Belmonte was asked three years ago about the ethical implications of creating chimeras, he underestimated the possibility of runaway progress: “It’s science fiction. We are at the earliest stage. Today, he is the proud father of three chimeras who were recently aborted by human macaques (more than 100 others simply withered in their potties). In the future, Belmonte hopes, similar creatures will grow up to have their organs harvested for human consumption. This means that the work of his laboratory is not only philanthropic, but that it is essential for the purpose he provides.
The short but carefully documented lives of these human-monkey hybrids have pushed medical science to the next level. Meanwhile, their mortal bodies have been dumped in bio-waste containers. Unfortunately, the prospect of feeding such a creature to adulthood is grimmer. What happens when single human stem cells migrate to the monkey’s brain?
Given the many examples of mixed traits in adult chimeras, concerned scientists predict that this modified simian would exhibit human intelligence. For example, it might be smart enough to find out how the Statue of Liberty was buried in the sand up to her neck. The possibility is not only reasonable, given current trends, probably unavoidable.
In fact, if a behavior is pleasant and possible, some powerful people will have to do it – if they have not already done so. But by the time they are caught, it is probably too late.
At what point did you sell your soul?
Your child needs braces today to feel good about her smile. Tomorrow she needs a Neuralink chip to keep up with school. Given the laws of supply and demand, the price of fresh fetal tissue could be the crypto-bubble of tomorrow. It turns out to be good indeed.
Again, the question for ordinary people is not how to stop this technocratic revolution from taking place. If the electromagnetic pulse had not been fried, the ship would have already sailed. The question is how to stay human in this emerging world.
At what point are you just stubborn? On the other hand, at what point did you sell your soul?