Wetware: An Ethical Perplexity Pickle
A biocomputing startup launched a platform giving users access to human brain organoids to process information, i.e. to compute. The business co-founded by Vlad The Impaler and Doctor Mengele alleges that their “bioprocessors” consume a million times less power and, therefore, are environmentally friendly. In a nutshell, the for-profit conclave of Doctors Frankenstein creates neuronal structures in a petri dish, keeps them alive for 100 days or so—floating in a life supporting fluid—and connect electrodes so their software stack allows for input to go through the lab-grown mini-brains, process it, and produce an interpreted, readable output. Think about your laptop but with a tiny, gooey life form inside.
Let’s analyze the different ethical angles of this fuckery originated in the brains of yet another group of humans playing to be the Almighty.
First question is: Can those organoids develop some form of awareness or baseline consciousness? The human brain has more than 80 billion neurons and the little toys created by the heirs of Shiro Ishii in their Unit 731 have only 10,000 neurons. The question is: where does consciousness begin? If there’s a remote chance that those organoids can feel or perceive, an orgiastic can of worms is immediately opened and we must talk about moral obligations toward them. We must.
Second question: The organoids are grown from “induced” stem cells. While this avoids direct harm to living people, it is still a manipulation of human biological stuff for technological ends. Turning human cells into computing tools may or may not cross a line. However, the line exists and Wetware possibly dances mambo on top of it.
Third question: No matter how environmentally friendly the bioprocessors are, it is obligatory to ask ourselves whether it is justifiable to enslave living tissue for human convenience, regardless if it is lab-grown. Historically, humans have used animals or nature for progress and, at many times in history, have used unpaid labor (a euphemism for slaves) to build pyramids, shag monarchs, or work the fields. I am not making all these situations equivalent but the principle behind it is the same: when is it ethical to use life and when is it not?
Fourth quandary: I refuse to grow out of my scientific ignorance by using ChatGPT but, as far as I understand, the cells used had to be donated by someone. I have absolutely no doubt that a team of the finest, most expensive Swiss lawyers drafted a 100-page consent to be signed by the donors. Hey, I bet anyone 5 miserable euros that that is the case. And still, I wonder, to what point we can say that the donors understood to perfection what were the plans of the modern MK-Ultra Sidney Gottliebs? That is a question about informed consent. What makes it “informed”? The 100-page document they signed?
Fifth is my favorite—and the use of “favorite” here is deliberately morbid. The lifespan of the organoids is 100 days. I do not have the details from the mouths of the gang of Jack Parsons, but I presume that after those 100 days the organoids die or are discarded. Is it ethical to create life for commercial purposes and with a built-in expiration? Is there a moral duty towards those forms of life during and after their “shelf life”?
Sixth is eerie, so hang in there. Dopamine rewards are used to train the organoids, mimicking learning. This is manipulation, right? I mean, what’s the difference between Pavlov toying with his dog’s appetite and this particular case? Dopamine is what is used to excite sentient beings, be it by purposeful stimuli or mere instinct. There is an unequivocal manipulation angle to the whole affair. This very much depends on how we see the organoids: tools or entities?
Seventh is a double whammy: Like absolutely all businesses the goal of the Umbrella Corporation is to scale up. Isn’t it playing with fire to add more oomph to the organoids to the point where the law of unintended consequences kicks in—as it always does? It always does. At some point, complexity and scale will create an entire brain, even a full-scale human. But, do you know who is drooling over this question? Everyone who suspects that the decarbonization madness forcing humans to eat bugs and cows to stop farting is a dark project by Human Centipede Inc. (this one is a small easter egg for Resident Evil gamers).
Talking about abortion is like playing the Hitler card, I know. But amuse me for a bit, ok? This Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment-like enterprise brings forward the old debate about the exact point when life starts. When exactly does a clump of cells—with the undeniable potential to become a human—lights up the neon sign that says “Life Starts Here”? Is it 10,000 neurons? 1 billion? Or the whole 80 billion? While the organoids are not being grown with the purpose of becoming babies but are rather (literally) engineered to stay as they are, their functionality is a line blurring fiesta. That is the threshold we are wrestling here with. And it is not a new debate.
Look at it this way. The French, to name just one of many examples, state in their Civil Code that a fetus can inherit property if born alive. But, even before that, a merely conceived child (l’enfant conçu) can be named in a will and the rights are in suspense until birth. Yet, the rights came to the fore the very moment that a sperm won the swimming competition and fertilized the egg. There is a clear cut in the actual rights becoming fully delineated, of course, but that only goes to illustrate that humans juggle with axes set on fire every single time these issues arise—and they, finally, must draw a line with the same certainty of flipping a coin.
Granted: the organoids are not viable in the reproductive sense and they will not inherit a piece of land or a security box in a Swiss bank containing gold coins. If you push me, at this very moment in time the legal standpoint of wetware is nothing more than biological material, not persons, much like the spit you send to DNA labs to find about your ancestry—and then become data sold to the Chinese for future AI-powered bioweapons. At this particular point, I am not aware if there is a single jurisdiction on God’s green earth that grants any right to lab-grown clusters of neural material. However—and here goes another 5 euro bet—when the organoids get more complex, an army of lawyers are going to have a big party testing the courts. I can even tell you what the debate will boil down to: intent. Lawyers love Byzantine debates about intent.
