What Could Go Wrong With Engineered Life Forms?

 

That question left the hypothetical realm for reality when Michael Levin, director of the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University, and Josh Bongard, professor of computer science at the University of Vermont, teamed together to turn frog stem cells into robots.  During the robots' seven-day lifetime, they can move, collect small particles into piles, and even reproduce after a fashion.  Developed with the essential assistance of an artificial-intelligence supercomputer, the new entities—called "xenobots" after the Latin name of the frog species from which the cells were taken—are the first step in a long-anticipated field that has up to now existed only in the realms of dystopian science fiction.

 

Starting with knowledge of what frog skin and cardiac cells can do, the scientists tried billions of different combinations of cells in the computer to see which ones could do interesting things.  The computer eventually came up with recipes for the assembly of hundreds of cells, which the scientists then carried out in the laboratory in a finicky process like assembling microscopic Legos, only the Legos are incubated frog stem cells.  The resulting robots did indeed move around, carry small objects in custom-designed pouches, and a Pac-Man-shaped version could even reproduce, spitting out a smaller version of itself every now and then. 

 

Asked about the ethical implications of their research, Levin said, "When we start to mess around with complex systems that we don't understand, we're going to get unintended consequences."  Bomgard added, "There's all of this innate creativity in life. . . . We want to understand that more deeply—and how we can direct and push it toward new forms."

 

Levin and Bomgard are working scientists, not philosophers, so when they talk out of school, so to speak, addressing not the technicalities of AI-driven biological multicell-organism fabrication, but the wider implications of their work, they tend to say things that are not particularly profound or original.  Anyone who has had trouble driving an unfamiliar rental car has learned that messing around with complex systems that we don't understand can have unintended consequences.  The question is not whether unintended consequences will happen—they will—but what you do about them if they do, and how you keep the bad ones from hurting yourself or others.

 

What Bomgard said encapsulates three streams of philosophy and religion that have been flowing since prehistoric times.  The first stream is the wonder one feels at the awesome abundance and variety of life on Earth.  "Innate creativity" implies that it's simply there somehow, a brute fact of existence that Bomgard uses the passive voice for ("There is . . . creativity.")  This ignores the fact that in every other area of human endeavor—music, art, literature, and science itself—creativity appears to arise only from human intelligence.  The elaborate architecture of termite nests, in which somehow thousands of individually unintelligent creatures cooperate to build sophisticated towers and walls, is sometimes called "creative," but is more realistically categorized as instinct.  No termite colony has ever built a Corinthian column.  It takes human ingenuity to do that.

 

No reasonable scientist can deny that there is a creative spirit or principle in life, but the universally-observed prohibition on talking about God in this connection forces them simply to say it's out there without saying where it came from.  But a failure to acknowledge the source of all that creativity may lead to something worse than unintended consequences later on.

 

The second great stream of philosophy is the human desire to know, as Aristotle points out in the first words of his Metaphysics:  "All men by nature desire to know."  Bomgard echoes this when he says "We want to understand that more deeply," meaning the creativity of life.  Up to the time of Sir Francis Bacon, philosophers sought wisdom as the highest secular good.  But since Bacon, the unadulterated desire simply to know something has been subordinated most of the time to the third great stream of philosophical inquiry:  how can we use this knowledge to, in Bacon's words, "better man's estate"? 

 

In more prosaic terms, the difference between the two streams is the distinction between pure and applied science, although the distinction is often more hypothetical than real.  Ask any mathematician who has spent years pursuing a theory simply because it was beautiful and interesting, and then turns around to discover that the National Security Agency has made it an essential part of their latest encryption technology.  The fact is, pure science can turn into applied science at any time, and a lot of applied science has accidentally led to advances in pure science as well.

 

But that ignores the question of intent, which is the critical question that so far has remained unanswered, at least by Levin and Bomgard.  I will admit that the first thing I thought of when I read about what they were doing is a phrase first used by Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation, a half-science and half-fiction speculation on the future of nanotechnology.  Gray goo is what the world would turn into if we managed to develop a type of bacteria that could live and multiply by consuming almost anything.  Readers will recognize the xenobot as possibly a first necessary step in making gray goo.

 

Levin and Bomgard say there is no chance their modified frog embryo cells will escape the lab, as they can't live outside the specially prepared soup that they were incubated in, and when they die they are as harmless as the thousands of skin cells each of us shed from our bodies every day.  Well, maybe so.  But the same curiosity and "if we can do it, we must do it" attitude that drove these researchers to make their xenobots can (I don't say will) lead to the kind of disasters that we've seen in the last couple of years.  We may never know whether COVID-19 originated in a lab accident in Wuhan or by natural means.  But even the remote possibility that it was man-made should make us all take very hard and long looks at efforts to manipulate living things in a way that could lead to harm, even if it is accidental.

 

Sources:  CNN carried the article "World's first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say" by Katie Hunt on Nov. 29, 2021 at https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/29/americas/xenobots-self-replicating-robots-scn/index.html.  I also referred to the University of Vermont press release on the research at https://www.uvm.edu/news/story/team-builds-first-living-robots, and the Wikipedia article on gray goo.

 

Do RoboDogs Have Souls?

Anyone who has tried to keep a car going past the time when the manufacturer quits supporting it with spare parts knows about cannibalizing—taking parts from a junked car to keep another one running for a while.  But what if the culture you’re in regards the piece of machinery in question as having a soul?  Then you get into the situation described recently in Japan, where Sony made a robotic dog named Aibo for a few years, but ended production in 2006.  Since then, a repair company called A-Fun tries to keep Aibos running by salvaging parts from other Aibos.  But bowing to popular demand from former owners, A-Fun recently conducted a funeral ceremony for over a hundred soon-to-be-scrapped Aibos at a Buddhist temple, before disassembling them for parts.  An NPR report recently summarized this news from the Japan Times. 

As anyone who has studied the Japanese culture realizes, both Buddhism and the popular Japanese folk religion known as Shintoism assert that, in the words of the Buddhist priest conducting the ceremony, “All things have a bit of soul.”  This is in marked contrast to the prevailing Western cultural attitude toward souls, which says the idea of a soul is a defunct antique concept that doesn’t even apply to human beings, let alone robotic dogs. 

While the Japanese idea of the soul probably differs from the Western concept, both assert that there is something in a living (or apparently living) thing that is worthy of recognition, respect, and commemoration in the event that the physical embodiment of the soul ceases to be.  I recall reading somewhere that in one Japanese factory, workers bowed to and thanked their machines at the end of each work day.  And this behavior is consistent with the desire of former Aibo owners to know that their ex-pets will have some incense burned for them before becoming mere machine parts again. 

Aristotle defined the soul as the form of a living thing.  But he didn’t mean by “form” just the shape—he meant everything that makes it the kind of living thing that it is.  I think Aristotle might have some trouble with the idea of a man-made machine having a soul, because in his view only living things could have souls.  Apparently in Japan, people aren’t so picky.

This rather whimsical situation may be a forerunner of a much more serious issue we may find ourselves dealing with in the not too distant future:  the question of whether human-like artificial-intelligence (AI) robots have souls, or at least whether they deserve the kinds of rights we have historically bestowed on human beings.  In the subfield of ethics concerned with artificial intelligence, there is a movement called “robot rights,” and while no one has seriously taken action to claim such rights yet on the part of a particular robot, it is probably only a matter of time before somebody does.  With millions of people talking familiarly with Siri and Alexa every day, not to mention the computer programs that answer telephone calls with authentic-sounding voices, we are being trained to incorporate conversations with robots into our everyday existence. 

Lurking behind these developments is an ancient fear, the fear that our creations will turn like Frankenstein’s monster against us, and that we will aid and abet such a rebellion by granting robots rights that were historically reserved to humans.  How would you feel, for example, if you got a notice one day that a robot who used to work for you was suing you?  Or if you were arrested for violation of a robot’s right to—whatever?  Have three recharging sessions a day? 

It may sound silly, but imagining such a situation throws into sharp relief the intuition that anything we make—in the ordinary sense of fabrication—should be subject to our wills, and not the other way around.  This intuition is consistent with the Great Chain of Being, an ancient concept that is still very powerful in Western society, although many have consciously rejected it, at least in part. 

To quote Wikipedia, the Chain, supposedly decreed by God, goes like this:  “The chain starts with God and progresses downward to angels, demons (fallen/renegade angels), stars, moon, kings, princes, nobles, commoners, wild animals, domesticated animals, trees, other plants, precious stones, precious metals and other minerals.”  The sequence of the old question that can start the “twenty questions” game—“animal, vegetable, or mineral?” observes the order of the Great Chain of Being. 

Now a person who doesn’t believe in God is probably going to start their own version of the Chain with humans at the top, but once you get rid of the Chain’s alleged originator, namely God, the order is pretty arbitrary.  I’m sure you can find someone who would put a turnip higher in the Chain than their mother-in-law, for example.  And once you start playing with it, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t put some future super-intelligent AI robot ahead of us in line.  But if we do that, we’ll pay a price, even if the worst nightmares of the dystopian future do not come to pass and robots or their machine descendants don’t enslave us, or just wipe us out as not worth keeping around.

Above all, the Great Chain of Being reflects the order that God instituted in the universe.  And trying to tamper with that order logically leads to disorder.  To give an extreme example, a person who puts possession of a beautiful diamond (a mineral) above his relationship to his wife (a human) is introducing disorder into his life, a disorder that will lead to trouble. 

Of course, too strict an adherence to the Great Chain of Being would justify the continued existence of exploitative regimes, the divine right of kings, and other anti-democratic ideas that we have rightly freed ourselves from.  But the distinction between human beings on the one hand, and all other parts of the physical realm on the other hand, is a vital one that we ignore at our peril. 

I just had to decommission a laptop computer that served me well for the last six years.  I now keep its brain (the hard drive) on my desk both as a memento and as a backup in case I need something that didn’t get transferred in the migration process to my new computer.  While I didn’t feel the need to hold a funeral ceremony for the old laptop, I can respect people who do such things, because I think seeing souls where they probably aren’t is a better thing than not seeing them at all.

Sources:  My wife drew my attention to the NPR online article “In Japan, Old Robot Dogs Get a Buddhist Send-Off,” at https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/05/01/607295346/in-japan-old-robot-dogs-get-a-buddhist-send-off.  I also referred to Aristotle’s definition of the soul at https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/psyche.htm and the Wikipedia articles on the Great Chain of Being and the ethics of artificial intelligence.