It’s been a big month for sci-fi primates. On April 8, Elon Musk’s start-up Neuralink announced that they have created a cyborg monkey that can play MindPong with a brain chip. The following week, scientists at the Salk Institute in California revealed that they successfully grew human macaque embryos in test tubes. These hybrid babies were aborted after 20 days.
The ethical implications of such experiments are now discussed with a resigned shrug. All of this has a sense of inevitability. Powerful people will indulge in any behavior that is both enjoyable and possible. What could be more pleasant than playing God?
The practical question is not how to stop them, but how to survive in their technocratic era. Where do we draw such boundaries? Do we reflexively reject the terms and conditions of technology? Or, when it’s our turn to get microchipped, are we going to take the plunge?
Ultimately, these are religious questions. Many traditional cultures regard living things as sacred. Endowed with a spark of consciousness, every creature deserves dignity, even those we kill and eat. From this point of view, tinkering with the basic makeup of a living being is a form of blasphemy, especially in the case of humans.
To materialists – quite widespread in Silicon Valley – an organism is just a collection of cells and chemical signals with nothing like a ‘soul’. In their self-image, these innovators are simply joining nature’s inexorable march from steam engines to smartphones to cyborgs and beyond. Many of them perceive pain and suffer only as 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 wired primate is celebrated as a major breakthrough in cyborg technology. The overall system is quite simple. Neuralink scientists trained a nine-year-old macaque, Pager, to play Pong and other puzzles on a computer screen using a joystick. Every time the monkey made a good move, a metal tube squirted banana smoothie into its mouth.
All the while, Pager’s brain was scanned by two Neuralink chips inserted into his skull. More than 2,000 threads fanned out into his gray matter, controlling his motor cortex as he moved the joystick back and forth and soaked up the banana smoothie. After the monkey’s neural activity correlated with its on-screen actions, the researchers pulled out the joystick.
The cursor kept moving. The monkey was playing a video game with nothing but his brainwaves. Maybe it’s just me, but it seemed like the cursor moved more smoothly when using the Neuralink chip.
According to Musk’s stated ambitions, this breakthrough is just a stepping stone to introducing Neuralink chips into human skulls, merging our cognition with artificial intelligence. In the hyper-competitive world looming just over the horizon – when AI has surpassed the human mind – getting a brain chip could be seen by many as just one way to keep up with the rat race.
The Neuralink Monkey is just the latest chapter in a long history of animal-machine hybrids. Twenty years ago, Northwestern University in Chicago unveiled the first vertebrate cyborg. In that experiment, scientists cut the brain of a lamprey from its head, kept the brain alive in a nutrient solution, hooked wires to its visual and motor cortex, and stuffed the conscious organ into a small machine the size of a hockey puck. There, the eel’s visual cortex was connected to light sensors, and the motor cortex controlled the wheels of the device.
Researchers placed this fresh cyborg in a dark room. They flashed lights at one end of the room and then the other. As lampreys orient for light coming through the ocean’s surface, the brain-controlled hockey puck turned and moved toward the light wherever it shone. The creature buzzed back and forth, desperately trying to orient itself.
Two decades ago, publications such as CNN and the Washington Post responded with suspicion and moral concern to such claims. Today, they describe the rise of technocracy with a mixture of awe and shameless product placement, if they cover it at all. When they look at Musk’s cyborg macaque, they see a bright future where the lame will walk, the blind will see, and the dumb will think like super intelligent machines.
Planet of the human-monkey hybrids
On April 15, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte and his joint US-Chinese team at the Salk Institute announced 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 snake’s tail, and a goat’s body, and it blew fire.
Today we see myths becoming reality. Made in Promethean bio-labs around the world, “chimeras” are hybrid creatures whose stem cells come from multiple species. This pursuit has been ongoing for more than five decades. During that time, scientists have created viable rat / mouse hybrids, a meager sheep / goat and a lame quail / chicken. More recently, the Salk Institute has developed pig hosts that grow healthy human lungs.
The way it works is simple. Lab technicians take a fertilized embryo (such as a macaque) and then add the stem cells of another organism (such as a human). They swayed the resulting entity in vitro – or preferably, in womb – then step back to watch the “magic” happen.
One of the stranger results is the mixing of behavioral tendencies. A good example is a classic mouse hybrid. Scientists mixed the stem cells of a nervous strain with a more docile variety. The behavior of the lab-grown offspring was somewhere in between.
When Belmonte was asked three years ago about the ethical implications of chimeric making, he downplayed the possibility of runaway progress: “That’s science fiction. We are at the earliest stage. Today, he is the proud father of three recently aborted human macaques chimeras (more than 100 others are simply withered in their pots). In the future, Belmonte hopes, similar creatures will grow up harvesting their organs for human use. That means that his lab’s work is not only philanthropic, but also necessary for the purposes he envisions.
The short but accurately documented lives of these human-ape hybrids took medical science to the next level. Meanwhile, their mortal bodies were thrown into biological waste containers. Grim as that reality may be, the prospect of nurturing such a person into adulthood is far more troubling. What happens when a few human stem cells migrate to the developing monkey brain?
Given the many examples of mixed traits in adult chimeras, concerned scientists predict that this modified monkey would exhibit human-like intelligence. For example, it may be smart enough to find out how the Statue of Liberty is buried up to her neck in the sand. That possibility is not only reasonable, judging by current trends, but also likely unavoidable.
In reality, if behavior is both enjoyable and possible, then a few powerful people are obligated to do it – if they haven’t already done it. But by the time they get caught, it’s probably too late.
At what point have you sold your soul?
These days, your child needs braces to feel good about her smile. She needs a Neuralink chip tomorrow to keep up at school. Given the laws of supply and demand, the price of fresh fetal tissue could be tomorrow’s crypto bubble. That trend does indeed seem to be in full swing.
Again, the question for ordinary people is not how to stop this technocratic revolution. Barring an electromagnetic pulse in the circuit, that ship has already sailed. The question is how you can remain human in this emerging world.
At what point are you just stubborn? On the other hand, at what point did you sell your soul?