On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  As we’ve already seen, a dominant premise in the science of artificial intelligence is that a person—a being with intellect, self-awareness, and self-interest—might come to exist in a nonbiological substance. Alan Turing (1912–1954) suggested that if a computer acts as intelligently as a human, then we must concede the probability that it is displaying intelligence; in other words, if it looks like intelligence, it is intelligence. He proposed a thought experiment, the Turing test, in which human interrogators in one room ask questions and converse with computers and real humans who are hidden in another room. Interrogators are not privy to which conversations are human and which are algorithmic. If a human participant identifies a computer conversation as a human conversation, then the computer’s intelligence has crossed over into real intelligence. A computer that deceives a human subject could be said to have passed the Turing test, and there would be no grounds on which to deny it some agency. Now, add to this assumption (thinking is as thinking does) the fact that mental activity appears to be a product of brain electrochemistry and you have a platform for arguing that mind is just a software program of functions running on a hardware foundation, the brain.

  Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969), Ghost in the Shell (1995), The Matrix (1999), and AI (2001) imagine the possibility that a conscious mind could reside in a digital format. But more than just fiction, we have had impressive real cases of chess-playing computers and neural-net machines that learn and adapt. Fears about AI fall into the camp of monsters of our own making because they once again promise the classic “playing God” transgression. Against this dominant paranoia about AI monsters is a group of philosophers and cognitive scientists who think it’s much ado about nothing. I tend to agree with them, although I reserve some trepidation. I seriously doubt that anything like a human mind could arise or be transplanted into a nonbiological body, although I concede that an unconscious problem-solver, very different from an animal mind, could exist and flourish in the future without direct human control. And perhaps this is enough of a concession to raise the fears of the robot pessimists. Maybe it’s the dissimilarity that’s so troubling. But I want to suggest that such intelligence will be radically unlike any human or animal that evolved in a biological body. Our minds, I suspect, are not downloadable.

  The spike against reductionist computer models of mind is not a retreat to mystical or occult ideas of immaterial souls. Instead, we have to dig deeper into the actual biology of mind to see that it is not easily extricated from the body in the way that digital dualists imagine. Yes, animal minds are information processors, but only in the context of much richer interests. At the ontogenetic level we have to recognize that mind develops in an environment that is simply saturated with feeling. From before birth, experiences are loaded with values, positive, negative, neutral, and a thousand gradations and mixtures of these. The representational modeling of the world that infants begin to develop is already value-laden. Information registers as such only in a context of rudimentary interests, and these interests grow in force and complexity as the organism develops. These interests seem too subjective, too feeling-based, and too multidimensionally complex to be retranslated into binary zeros and ones.16 Computational models treat the mind as if it were a calculator whose operations are overlaid with epiphenomenal feelings or sentiments. But the mind is of the body, not just in the body. The little detached cognitive calculator does indeed seem to exist in our later developed, mature mental circuitry, but it grew out of more bodily instinctual problem-solving systems (e.g., autonomic and reflex systems regulate our body temperature, digestion, heart rate, sexual stimulation, motor skills, and other biological forms of intelligence). It’s hard to imagine anything like an animal mind without including a nervous system of some sort, and some sort of life history (i.e., a childhood) to organize the values and the information into a coherent hierarchy. Thinking grows out of feeling.17

  At the phylogenetic level problem-solving intelligence evolved in steps, and every new innovation needed to interface with the older organic structures. Human intelligence is a Rube Goldberg machine of complex input-output pathways. As Daniel Dennett points out, we cannot divorce the informational message of intelligence from the medium in which it evolved. The building materials of mind, the organic transducers and effectors of perception and cognition, influence the kinds of information that can be received, communicated, and controlled. Long before humans had big brains they had elaborate functional systems for receiving information (olfactory chemical systems, etc.), processing that information (a primitive hind brain, etc.), and reacting to that information (fight or flight). Our more intellectual capacities of the neocortex have been built on and through the older control systems. Mind is the entirety of these interpenetrating pathways, all of which connect to body. Dennett says, “The new systems had to be built on top of, and in deep collaboration with, these earlier systems, creating an astronomically high number of points of transduction.”18 We can’t ignore these interpenetrations when we consider isolated control systems such as intelligence; these systems are not really isolated in the evolved organism. All this does not make AI impossible, but it does remind us that mind is heavily physiological, not just medium-neutral information.

  PLAYING GOD: BIOTECHNOLOGY

  As we’ve seen, hybrid creatures have always been somewhat troubling for our epistemological categories or taxonomies of nature, but also for our emotions. How should we feel about liminal beings? Zombies are between the living and the dead, hermaphrodites between the male and the female, chimeras between different animal species, and so on. But we now live in an unprecedented technological era that allows us to engineer many more boundary crossings than we ever imagined. Darwin has bequeathed a world of graded continua between kinds, rather than fixed and permanent essences. And biotechnology has given us the tools to move creatures around on these continua.

  The human body has become more plastic and open to manipulation than ever before. A dramatic case can be seen in the recent surgical recreation of a six-year-old severely brain-damaged girl named Ashley. Her parents elected to have her body redesigned in order to keep her small and easily transportable. A team of doctors administered a two-year regimen of intense estrogen, which closed her growth plates and shrank her height by over thirteen inches. In addition, Ashley’s uterus was removed to guard against future menstrual cramps, and also pregnancy if she were to be raped. Finally, Ashley’s breast buds were removed because she “has no need for developed breasts since she will not breast feed,” her parents argued, “and their presence would only be a source of discomfort to her.”19 Ashley’s parents refer to her as their “pillow angel” and believe that their modifications have improved the quality of life for their daughter. Critics think that transforming people into permanent children is a major violation of human rights. Is it okay to cultivate our children’s bodies as we might cultivate a bonsai tree? My goal is not to offer an ethical judgment on this complex case, but simply to point out that we can expect to see more of this somatic redesigning in the future. For years parents have been giving growth hormones to their short children to improve their social standing, so we can imagine other body modifications on the horizon. Manipulating the size, shape, and maturity of humans is just the start.

  In July 2008 a person who was living as a man, Thomas Beatie, gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Beatie, who was born female, had previously undergone hormone therapy and breast removal surgery in order to live as a man, eventually marrying a woman named Nancy. Beatie had retained his ovaries and uterus, and when his wife could not conceive a child, the couple elected to artificially inseminate Beatie. A pregnant Beatie explained to Oprah Winfrey that when the child was born, he would function as the father or masculine parent and Nancy would function as the mother. In a manner of speaking, Beatie started as a female, became a male, reverted to a female, and became a male again. His explanation is simple and compelling: “I feel it’s not
a male or female desire to have a child. It’s a human need. I’m a person and I have a right to have a biological child.”20

  Biotechnology now allows humans to transform their own gender identity. Transgendered people, those who do not fit neatly in one of the conventional male or female categories, have always been members of the human family. But advances in chemical therapy and surgery have allowed for unprecedented somatic modifications of gender. Being a boundary-crossing transgendered person is entirely comfortable for many people, while others feel strongly that they were assigned the wrong gender at birth. Those who feel trapped in the wrong kind of body and seek to realign their somatic gender with their inner sense of identity are sometimes referred to as transsexual, to differentiate them from transgendered people. Hormone therapy and surgical reconstruction are ways for some transsexuals to correct the original misalignment of psyche and body.21

  The meaning of gender-bending technology is not obvious, however, and depends largely on one’s background beliefs. Changing one’s gender is monstrous, for example, only if one first accepts the idea that gender categories are relatively fixed and that original gender assignments are correct. God makes you either a man or a woman, some argue, and changing one’s status is tantamount to violating God’s plan.22 But religious conservatives are incorrect if they think that secularists are happy to flout natural categories and make up any gender reality that suits them. If one accepts a Darwinian view of a gender continuum that is mutually constituted by hormones, genetics, and environment, then reassignment surgery is not a monstrous violation of nature but a nudge back into the correct category. Contrary to a relativism of gender, even Darwinian secularists accept the reality of gender specification. But unlike conservative theists, they make room for biological accidents. Biotechnology, in this view, is just a way to improve the lives of those who suffer in the wrong body, so to speak, no different from corrective lenses for the visually impaired.23 On the other hand, the far left has a different set of background beliefs and sees all forms of identity, including gender, as socially constructed, not biologically based. The only thing monstrous, in this view, is treating gender as if it were natural.

  Beyond the ontogenetic and phenotypic manipulations of gender, we can now also transform and hybridize the genetic makeup of animals and plants. We have not succeeded in creating entirely new species by hybridization and genetic manipulation, but we might well do so in the near future. At present we are focused on transgenic manipulations, such as increasing productivity in farm animals and crops and using livestock to produce medicines and nutraceuticals. Starting with tomatoes, many crops have been genetically modified to increase yield, resist insecticides, or last longer on the store shelf. Soybeans, corn, potatoes, cotton, sugar cane, and rice have all been genetically modified, often by splicing in genes from other species. Fish genes have been put into tomatoes, jellyfish genes into rabbits, and firefly genes into corn.

  The J. Craig Venter Institute has recently announced the creation of a species of new, partially synthetic bacteria, Mycoplasma laboratorium. Synthetic biology is pursuing such biotechnology in hopes of creating new biofuels and new environment-cleaning organisms. Agribusiness and large pharmaceutical corporations have been investing heavily in biotechnology for the past two decades, but Freeman Dyson predicts that a new age of decentralized noncorporate genetic engineering will dominate in the next generation. A more playful biotech future will arise, Dyson argues, when do-it-yourself genetic engineering kits become available for your average dog breeders, reptile enthusiasts, orchid amateurs, and every other kind of biohobbyist: “Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.”24

  This is a bold vision of our biotech future, exciting and a little frightening. Dyson envisions a time in the near future when kids will play genetic games with real eggs and seeds, trying to create the prickliest cactus or even the cutest dinosaur. The ethical question of whether or not we should pursue this future is one that Dyson explicitly brackets off and suggests we let our grandchildren decide. I tend to think, on the other hand, that letting our grandchildren decide the ethical issues will be too late in the game.

  Promethean potential. Today’s biotech possibilities make Dr. Frankenstein and Igor look like mere fledgling gods. From Frankenstein (Universal Pictures, 1931). Image courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.

  Many religiously minded thinkers will find Dyson’s sanguine picture of kids playing with genetic kits horrifying. But even secularists like myself would want us to think long and hard about appropriate limitations on such biotechnology. What will become of all the trial-run creatures that don’t turn out quite as the experimenter hoped but nonetheless now live and breathe in a liminal limbo? How will we control the garage-lab creations of dangerous microorganisms and new invasive species? Who will regulate all this new and dangerous creation, or will we pursue an ungov-erned free-market model and let the survival-of-the-fittest mechanisms sort it all out?

  One of the major concerns I have about playing with genetics is Darwin’s old concern, only magnified. Recall that Darwin believed that the only real monsters were the ones that humans had bred for ignorant aesthetic purposes. Natural selection has a tempo that weeds out unhealthy variations, whether or not they are aesthetically interesting. But artificial selection has given us bleeding diseases in Dobermans, respiration problems in bulldogs, cancer in boxers, eye lid curling in shar-peis, aorta problems in golden retrievers, and more. Imagine a very fast tempo biotech breeding program that is motivated by human interests rather than the health interests of the animals and plants themselves. Now imagine such misguided breeding programs for every pet species.

  Every gene codes for multiple traits. The same gene, turned on or off at different times, can control many diverse phenotypic traits, a phenomenon called pleiotropy, from a Greek phrase meaning “many influences.” The upshot is that when we think we are altering one trait with our biotech kits, we are also altering many hidden traits. A real case of such unintended genetic consequences occurred when breeders selected for a corn trait but ended up inadvertently devastating the entire strain. A gene that caused corn to lose its own tassel was selected for, but breeders did not understand that this same gene created a susceptibility to southern corn blight, and major crop destruction resulted.25

  The astronomical complexity of ecological relations seems like a good reason to be extremely careful with biotech engineering. The interconnections of animals and plants are so elaborate that one wonders if we could control all the variables. Organisms have evolved symbiotically. Not only would a slight change in a predator have major consequences for the prey animals (and vice versa), but many organisms live symbiotically inside each other. Humans and cows, for example, can’t even digest many foods without intestinal and ruminant bacteria that live in their gut. Cows have bacteria, protozoa, and even fungi living in their digestive tracts, and these help them break down the cellulose in their food. A slight genetic modification in these microbes might spell disaster for the larger mammals that serve as hosts.

  Perhaps these worries are only the typical Luddite anxieties, and the positive will outweigh the negative. It may well be that biotech science will be green and solve our problems of soil erosion, greenhouse gases, pandemics, food shortages, fish and forest depletions, and fuel shortages. Dyson says, “Once a new generation of children has grown up, as familiar with biotech games as our grandchildren are now with computer games, biotechnology will no longer seem weird and alien.”

  Francis Fukuyama is skeptical about the social world that biotech will inevitably create. In his book Our Posthuman Future, he predicts that genetic engineering will be used by wea
lthier parents as a new form of well-intentioned eugenics. The upper class will use biotechnology to make their children smarter, healthier, and more attractive: “If wealthy parents suddenly have open to them the opportunity to increase the intelligence of their children as well as that of all their subsequent descendants, then we have the makings not just of a moral dilemma but of a full-scale class war.”26 We should not, according to Fukuyama, make a new posthuman nature because our current one, flawed though it may be, has finally found a home in the hard-won social environment of liberal democracy. We finally have a good match between human nature and politics; the personal and the political successfully actualize each other’s potential.

  Using biology to improve social and political life was tried by the Nazis, and we would do well to avoid that terrible nightmare in the future. But, according to Fukuyama, pretending there is no human nature or that it is infinitely malleable led to the socialist utopias of the twentieth century, wherein families, money, religion, and education were all dismantled and recreated for the greater good. Although Fukuyama distances himself from knee-jerk religious objections to biotechnology, he nonetheless seems to share the same fears about reductionism. If we think, as posthumanists do, that humans are really just composed of material causes and there is nothing sacrosanct about their current composition, we will be more likely to play God with our social reality. Such utopian perfectibility movements have had a terrible track record. Yes, biotech can give us new personalities and powers, but only by taking away others; we’ll have pharmaceutical freedom from depression, but reduced creativity. According to Fukuyama, our very souls are at stake. As moral monsters, negligent about our duties and responsibilities, we will inadvertently create biological monsters.