In the original Blade Runner movie, Roy Batty, a replicant, is a biological robot. He searches for the source of his existence, his creator, Tyrell, to attempt to extend his life. Ultimately, Roy and his replicant friends seek self-preservation--they experience life and don't want to die.
I Want More Life F*&%er
Recently, I've been reading articles about brain organoids, blobs of stem cells that are coaxed into becoming brain cells.
https://stemcellres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13287-023-03302-x
https://www.livescience.com/minibrains-brain-organoids-explained
I find this extremely interesting, because we, as a society, struggle to define life, sentience, and intelligence. We have spectrums and rationalities that we clumsily use to delineate and quantify the entities in our world—humans, animals, plants, bacterium, viruses, etc. Yet, most of society holds humanity as something unique.
The Brain Makes Him More Human
Recently, I came upon this:
Here the scientists put a human brain organoid on a computer chip to give the collection of human neurons a way to express itself via electronic signals. Then, they plopped this mini-cyborg, not-quite-a-brain thing into a robot to see what happens.
As I read that article, I thought of RoboCop. If anything has self-preservation, it's RoboCop. Its human components reside in a body of armor. Murphy starts life as a human man and ends up as a man-machine hybrid.
Much like in Blade Runner, the corporation that paid for RoboCop sees him as property, not a human. Yet, the engineers who create him consider him better than the movie's competing robot soldiers, because of his human brain, even though it was altered to remove memories from Murphy's previous human life.
A Face Only a Mother Could Love
A brain organoid is much like other types of organoids (yes, labs do this a lot). It’s really just a bunch of stem cells that have been induced to become a specific type of organ cell. Another group of ingenious folks decided to make skin organoids, which has the amazing potential to help burn victims and other people with damaged dermis. In their research, they did this. I applaud the work, but the visuals are kind of creepy.
To me, though, it is a slippery slope. If we can create something out of stem cells that is wholly organic (albeit human) and use it to control something (mechanical or other organoid things), then I wonder at what point does organoid become an organ? And how long until a collection of organoids become life? Once we make a live thing and give it mobility, does it have rights? Is it responsible for its actions?
And, how long until we assemble organoids of all types and create completely biological androids—replicants? A character in Blade Runner, Sebastian, has an entire apartment of biological toys keeping him company. And consider the Star Wars or Star Trek universes. Science fiction abounds with non-human, intelligent life. These beings have laws and traditions and emotions (and drink beer).
The Stuff of Life
And then I came upon this. Here folks at Google claim to have created digital life (sort of). They wrote some code snippets and let them randomly commingle until, low and behold, they started self-replicating, a widely believed to be an essential component to life.
Due to hardware constraints, the experiment only went that far. The self-replicating program essentially died. It ran out of resources. But, perhaps, with beefier computers and more time, like say the 4.5 billion years Earth has had, the bits code will randomly assembling and mutating might become us.
It's Alive! Or is it?
Unfortunately, we don't have a good definition of life. Scientists and researchers (and lay-folks) seem to disagree on what it means to be sentient.
If a fly moves away from our attempts at swatting it, is it expressing self-preservation, or is it blindly executing an inherent set of instructions? We have evidence plants communicate with each other. Do these entities know they are doing that? Are they aware, organized, intelligent? Or is it simply the result of a biological program, like a human heart beating?
How often do people perform an automatic act, repeating a learned pattern, such as commuting home from work without remembering traversing the entire route? Is the act of performing a habit without conscious awareness evidence of life or intelligence? Or is it just an expression of simple programming?
Thanks to scientists, researchers, and just ordinary curious folks, it's an interesting world out there. And, for science fiction writers like me, an immense source of inspirational fodder. We enthusiastically create life.
Happy reading and happy writing!
I loved how you wrapped up this piece. Keep on creating!