Healthy mice have been born from same-sex parents in China. To investigate the ways that mammalian reproduction differs from other animals, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences used stem cells and genetic manipulation to produce 29 live, healthy offspring from two female mice. The pups have since grown to adulthood and had babies of their own.
What are the values of religion in the 21st century? As we continue accelerating towards a new scientific and technological era, it shouldn’t be a surprise to find an increasing number of people adhering to secular values and skeptical critical thinking. But then religion persists. Interestingly, while newer religions are emerging, they’re subsequently accommodating this new era into their philosophical belief structure.
In this cyborg religion, being against science and technology is a sin! Then again, so is having sex and doing drugs. Bummer!
Biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. And implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others. “You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.
Patrick Kramer sticks a needle into a customer’s hand and injects a microchip the size of a grain of rice under the skin. “You’re now a cyborg,” he says after plastering a Band-Aid on the small wound between Guilherme Geronimo’s thumb and index finger. The 34-year-old Brazilian plans to use the chip, similar to those implanted in millions of cats, dogs, and livestock, to unlock doors and store a digital business card.
Kramer is chief executive officer of Digiwell, a Hamburg startup in what aficionados call body hacking—digital technology inserted into people. Kramer says he’s implanted about 2,000 such chips in the past 18 months, and he has three in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information. Digiwell is one of a handful of companies offering similar services, and biohacking advocates estimate there are about 100,000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”
Research house Gartner Inc. identified do-it-yourself biohacking as one of five technology trends—others include artificial intelligence and blockchain—with the potential to disrupt businesses. The human augmentation market, which includes implants as well as bionic limbs and fledgling computer-brain connections, will grow more than tenfold, to $2.3 billion, by 2025, as industries as diverse as health care, defense, sports, and manufacturing adopt such technologies, researcher OG Analysis predicts. “We’re only at the beginning of this trend,” says Oliver Bendel, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences & Arts Northwestern Switzerland who specializes in machine ethics.
Everyone knows it takes a male and a female to make a baby. But what a new study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences suggests is that maybe it doesn’t. In a new study, the team of scientists reports they did the seemingly impossible: Produce healthy baby mice from two mothers. The researchers describe their achievement in a breakthrough new paper in Cell Stem Cell.
The single-sex parent phenomenon has been observed naturally in reptiles, fish, amphibians, and invertebrates, but it was never thought to be possible in mammals, who reproduce differently. But as the team describe in their paper, all it took was overcoming the genetic limitations that usually make same-sex parenting impossible. The team, which also included researchers from Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin, China, used a combination of stem cells and CRISPR precision gene editing to produce healthy mice from two mothers. Interestingly, they tried the same with embryos from two fathers, but those offspring only lived a few days.
In the paper, they describe the bizarre, ingenious way the mouse embryos were formed using an egg from one mother a stem cell from another mother. The team’s breakthrough was figuring out how to manipulate the DNA of the stem cell so that the babies wouldn’t have birth defects.
Certainly, there are those in the movement who espouse the most extreme virtues of transhumanism such as replacing perfectly healthy body parts with artificial limbs. But medical ethicists raise this and other issues as the reason why transhumanism is so dangerous to humans when what is considered acceptable life-enhancement has virtually no checks and balances over who gets a say when we “go too far.” For instance, Kevin Warwick of Coventry University, a cybernetics expert, asked the Guardian, “What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better – or which might allow you to live longer?” while another doctor stated that he would have “no part” in such surgeries. There is, after all, a difference between placing a pacemaker or performing laser eye surgery on the body to prolong human life and lend a greater degree of quality to human life, and that of treating the human body as a tabula rasa upon which to rewrite what is, effectively, the natural course of human life.
While many transhumanist ideals remain purely theoretical in scope, what is clear is that females are the class of humans who are being theorised out of social and political discourse. Indeed, much of the social philosophy surrounding transhumanist projects sets out to eliminate gender in the human species through the application of advanced biotechnology and assisted reproductive technologies, ultimately inspired by Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex and much of Donna Haraway’s writing on cyborgs. From parthenogenesis to the creation of artificial wombs, this movement seeks to remove the specificity of not gender, but sex, through the elision of medical terminology and procedures which portend to advance a technological human-cyborg built on the ideals of a post-sex model.
It’s unclear whether we’ll actually reach the point of achieving legitimate mind-uploading, which addresses the dilemma of physical continuity. What is clear, however, is that virtual reality is quickly making room for the ability of users to fall in love. In so doing, this will also make room for other ventures—both positive (sex) and problematic (crime).
As we continue pushing forward towards a future of sexual abundance, whereby getting into bed with technology is the new norm, we’ll also need to remain vigilant against criminals who wish to exploit us — even sexually.
Westworld’s first season was largely focused on the abuse of artificial life, given that the park hosts’ purpose almost exclusively revolved around sex, violence, and suffering. The freedom Dolores and her ilk were fighting for was simple consciousness—a right to their own memories and self-awareness. In just the first four episodes, Westworld’s second season has exploded that basic quest into all kinds of fascinating directions, but “The Riddle of the Sphinx” was the first to really grapple with one of the most obvious questions in AI, which is: Isn’t artificial intelligence the key to immortality?
Three Atlantic staffers discuss “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” the fourth episode of Season 2.
