July 28, 2016 • 51 mins
We explore the wonderful, terrifying world of combining technology and organic material. From robots with slug muscles to an artificial stingray, what's up with cyborgs?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks the future and says, you know, I
hate to ask, but our friends electric. I'm Jonathan Strickland
(00:22):
and I'm Joe McCormick. And of course they are all
organisms are electric? Actually is that true? I'm not sure.
Maybe electro chemical. Are they all electric? Maybe not viruses?
That might be one of the weird virus definition issue.
I don't think they're all electric. I think some are hybrids.
That was a terrible joke. All right, Well, let's actually
(00:43):
transition into the introduction for our podcast that doesn't involve
weird word play that doesn't get us anywhere. We're gonna
be talking about, uh, something that we've touched on in
previous episodes, right, cyborgs. No way, we haven't touched on that.
And I've never personally touched us like cyborg. Yeah, but
(01:06):
I would. And furthermore, we have talked a little bit
about cyborgs in the past, or rather about upgrading organisms.
Um back into scemberteen, we did a whole episode about
cyborg cockroaches. It's called biobots. If you want to look
it up. Uh. And we also talked about the possibility
and the ethics of human upgrades way way way back
(01:26):
in March. I wonder what that's like. I can't even
believe anyone was alive. Then it seems so long ago.
Um that one's called cyborg's ethics and you, um, it
just occurred to me. Did we even talk about the
amazing X Files episode were of the cop cop copper phages?
Am I saying that right? Copper pages? I don't know
if we did the Christian and I did in a
(01:46):
stuff to blow your mind episode that we did about
the science of the X Files. I want to say
that at that point, none of us were rewatching the
series and so we probably weren't talking about it, okay,
And then once it all hit Netflix and we started
kind of binge watching X Files episodes, I was kind
of hate watching it. Well, hey, if you have Netflix
(02:07):
and you can go back and watch War the Copper Fadges,
that's like a top five episodes. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's
one of the four that was written by Darren Morrigan.
I might be a huge X Files nerd uh. And
those four that he wrote I think are the best Uh,
he starred or co starred in one of the others
that I really like, called Small Potatoes at any rate,
So we're not talking about Darren Morgan in this episode
(02:28):
X Files that much. But but yes, uh, cybernetic life forms,
life forms that have some extra bits kind of worked in,
and or synthetic life because we also touched on synthetic
life relatively recently. Uh, I don't know, scroll down, see
what you find. Yeah, it's like it's like maybe from
maybe a month back or something. It's pretty recent that
we talked about synthetic life forms. You know, it sounds
(02:51):
no offense to you all. It sounds like we are
already getting a little mushy with the terminology here, Like
what it what is the category distinction we're trying to
create eight about these uh, the joining at the edges
of of technology and life. Let's let's let's clear that
up a little bit. Okay. Uh, this term cyborg, you
(03:11):
probably know it most from the Genclaude van Damme movie
Cyborg directed by Albert Pune, or maybe not. You probably
know it from culture. Cyborg is a term that has
generally come to be understood as some sort of union
between the biological organism and the machine in some way
or another. And I say that generally because there is
(03:32):
a gap between the specialized definition of cyborg and the
common use of the term in culture, right, Like, he's
more a machine now than C slug, twisted and evil. Yeah,
So the term cyborg is a shortening of cybernetic organism.
You might know that much. And it was coined back
in nineteen sixty by Manfred Klein's and Nathan Klein. Their
(03:55):
names sounds similar, but they're not the same, spelled different.
And that that article in nineteen sixty was in the
journal Astronautics and it was called Cyborgs and Space. So
I want to read a quote for you. Go ahead.
If a fish wish to live on land, it could
not readily do. So they're off to a good start,
I think, starting to sell very susical at the very beginning.
(04:17):
If a fish wished to live on land. Uh, If, however,
a particularly intelligent and resourceful fish could be found who
had studied a good deal of biochemistry and physiology, was
a master engineer and cyberneticist, and had excellent lab facilities
available to him, this fish could conceivably have the ability
(04:38):
to design an instrument which would allow him to live
on land and breathe air quite easily in the same manner.
It is becoming apparent that we will in the not
too distant future have sufficient knowledge to design instrumental control
systems which will make it possible for our bodies to
do things which are no less difficult. So specifically, in
(04:59):
this human analogy that they make, they were talking about
space clients in client argue that as humans venture into space,
it's going to be easier to change the human animal
to be better suited to space conditions than it will
be to create earthlike conditions in space for the unaltered human. Interesting,
(05:20):
so they're talking about actually changing human beings in some
form or function, not necessarily, you know, using technology to
compensate for the things we would encounter in space, but
to actually change humans. So that well, yeah, they are
talking about using technology to compensate, but the compensation wouldn't
(05:40):
be external in our environment, integrated into humans as opposed
to like a space suit, right right, and and I'll
be it. This is before space suits existed, right, this
was before there was any human space exploration. Published in
nineteen sixty, the first human space flight. Your Garrands in
nineteen sixty one, so this is before we had any
experien rants whatsoever in this field. But by their definition quote,
(06:03):
the cyborg deliberately incorporates exogynous meaning coming from outside exogenous components,
extending the self regulatory control function of the organism in
order to adapt it to new environments. And this means
that the cyborg is not enslaved to his or her
survival machinery. Uh, the the incorporated survival machinery operates quote
(06:27):
automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create,
to think, and to feel. So in in an interesting
kind of way. I think the emphasis here because people
always think about human cyborgs and the human context is
changing our nature. But the way Clines and Incline here
envisioned it, it it was almost as if it was enabling
(06:51):
us to be more like the kind of creature we
wish to be, you know, the ideal, yeah, trans humanism,
rather than cybern netics the way that we consider maybe
cyborg netics. Yes, well yeah, I mean the emphasis is
on is on not making us different fundamentally, but just
sort of like getting all of the rudimentary survival junk
(07:13):
out of the way, so that our existence can be
focused on the things that really matter. This gets right
to the heart of a lot of different issues we've
talked about on this show that aren't necessarily directly related
to technology. The general basic income, one could argue, is
covering very much the same ground, the idea that once
you have accounted for the necessities, the basic needs of survival,
(07:36):
you free people up to pursue the things that they
value and thus can become better contributors to society overall.
It's the same similar ideas, just a very different kind
of approach to it. Yeah, so in their vision, they'll
remember that this is talking about trying to adapt us
to other environments very specifically, and cyborg came to mean
(07:58):
something much more general role in the parlance of our times.
But originally they were talking very much about space. And
one example to give of modifying the human to live
in space is breathing. So you know, breathing is required
to purge CO two and replenish oxygen. There's no oxygen
in space, you might have heard before, and so clients
(08:21):
clients incline right quote an inverse fuel cell and no,
we we would probably call this a regenerative fuel cell today.
The idea of an inverse fuel cell is it does
the opposite of what a normal fuel cell does, instead
generating electricity through this chemical reaction that you put in
electricity and you get chemicals out. Um, they say, Uh,
(08:42):
an inverse fuel cell capable of reducing CO two to
its components with removal of of the carbon and recirculation
of the oxygen would eliminate the necessity for lung breathing.
Such a system operating either on solar or nuclear energy
would replace the lung make breathing as we know it unnecessary.
(09:02):
Conventional breathing would still be possible should the environment permit it,
discontinuing the fuel cell operation. Also, for quote fluid balance,
they basically recommend a sort of catheter filter IVY circuit. Pleasant. Okay,
what what book does that It's gonna remind me of
(09:23):
like Catch twenty two or something with one tube going
in and one tube going out and the character convinced
that the two tubes are essentially all part of the
same system. Um, yeah, that's so well. Anyway, given this
stricter understanding in the light of the original definition, that
there is really a distinction between cyborgs like as they're
defined here, and other terms you might use like bio
(09:46):
hybrids or bio robots or something like that. So cyborgs
are technically augmented organisms, and these augmentations are designed to
expand the self regulatory control function. As they said a
lot like technological equivalence of homeostasis systems and humans. That said,
I think for the purpose of this episode, we should
(10:07):
probably just accept that most people use cyborg to mean
any kind of hybrid of an organism or robot or machine. Right,
So you could either start from the the perspective of
an organism that you have modified technologically in some way,
or technology that has has uh biological material incorporated into
(10:28):
it in some way exactly. Yeah, So that that brings
up the question of like, what are the what's the
necessary constituent nature of an object that we think of
as a cyborg. So imagine a space pig. Okay, Yeah,
you've got a space pig with an inverse fuel cell
that facilitates lungless respiration. It's a cyborg. This is cyberpig
(10:48):
um and it can use electricity to oxygenate its tissues
and purge c O two in a vacuum without lung breathing.
Isn't that great? Pretty sure? That's the definition of link
hogthrob in pigs and space and keep on. I like
where you're going with this, Okay, But what if hypothetically
you had something sort of coming from the opposite end
of the spectrum. There's a mechanical fuel cell that uses
(11:11):
a disembodied pig lung to facilitate the generation of electrical current.
Now I'm not sure if you could really do that,
but I'm just saying hypothetically, by the more common understanding,
would this be a cyborg too? Technically yes, yeah, I
mean the original definition probably not. But and we've also
moved from the Muppets to David Cronenberg kind of territory.
(11:31):
But I'm willing to roll with it. Okay. So does
the organic synthetic hybrid system in some sense need to
have a brain or nervous system to be a cyborg?
It seems like, yeah, yeah, it depends. Like like I
would argue that if you were to go back in
time thirty years and talk about the concept of cyborg,
(11:53):
I think a lot of people would would in all fields,
would generally agree that they think of it as as
largely an autonomous sort of thing, that whether it's a
computer brain or an organic brain, that the robotic biological
thing itself would have some form of autonomy. I would
argue today that's not that's no longer a necessary criterion
(12:18):
that you could argue. You could have a cyborg organism.
I guess that's that's being redundant. You could have a
cyborg that the machine exactly and your pin number. You
could have the decisions quote unquote that the cyborg is
making come completely externally through external controls. That I think
(12:40):
would be an acceptable idea today, The idea that that
you've got this organic slash technological thing, but it's under
external control, it has no agency of its own. I
think people would still say, like, well, for lack of
a better unless you're going to go with something like
(13:02):
bio hybrid, or we might as well call it a
cyborg and is so much more fun. It is also
just like you immediately sit there like we're gonna be
talking about ce slug cyborgs very shortly. And when you
sit there and think CE slug cyborg, first thing I
think is that there's like a terminator version of a
sea slug out there. That's not what is actually happening,
(13:23):
but it's way more fun to think of it that
way though. Well, let's get to the slugs. Then we're
gonna come back to some sort of theoretical discussions at
the end. But Jonathan, do you have something to tell
me about slugs? I't. I didn't want it to come
out this way on the podcast. I have a complicated
relationship with slugs. I admit. When I was young, I
(13:46):
had an occasional uh foray into sadism by placing the
salt upon the slugs. I regret those actions. Now as
an adult, I think I did it too. I'm sorry,
but dogs, but these slugs are different. These are sea slugs.
These are not not land based slugs that are gnawing
on the various things you have in your garden. Different
(14:08):
kind of animal, different kind of animal entirely, and can
at you for what you did when you were a kid,
one would hope. I mean, if it holds a grudge,
then they they are far more united than I gave
them credit for. Hopefully we can upgrade their mental powers
through extra computing add ons CA so that way they
don't Yeah, well, the whole thing we're talking about here
(14:30):
is actually a research project done with a team working
with Case Western Reserves Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory, which is
a real thing that exists. It's incredible. Uh. They've developed
an organic robot bio hybrid, or if we prefer our
our other nomenclature, a cyborg that consists of three D
(14:53):
printed parts, very very tiny three D printed parts, and
the mouth muscle from a sea slug. Just the mouth
must just the mouth muscle. They they first started practicing
with muscle cells. They tried to grow muscle cells on
kind of an organic scaffold, but they found that the
actual structure of the mouth muscle from this particular sea
(15:16):
slug was already pretty much exactly what they needed in
order to accomplish the movements they had in mind with
this this three D print material. So, as we talked
about earlier in that analogy, this would be kind of
like the pig lung that facilitates the fuel cell. Yeah,
that in this case, the muscle is there in order
to provide the locomotion of this little robot. It doesn't
(15:39):
have any you know, other anima to it. That's that's
what they're using. The muscle. For it's it's a pusher,
it's a binder. I guess because I think of it
that you've connected two ends of a muscle. This is oversimplifying,
but you've connected two ends of a muscle to two
anchor points on a bendable, flexible three D inted material.
(16:01):
And then when you apply an external electric field. We
know that when you stimulate muscle tissue with low levels
of electricity, you cause it to contract so or or spasm,
depending upon the way to series of contractions. Exactly so,
doing that they can make the muscle contract and thus
bend the bendy three D printed parts, and then you know,
(16:24):
through pulses, they can make the actual robot move forward.
But just to be clear, I mean we sort have
already said this, but I do want to specify there.
We're not talking about like a mechanical thing inspired by
the way the cea slug muscle works, literally just a
CE slug muscle. Yeah, we're talking about, well, why would
you choose a CE slug muscle in the first place, Like,
(16:46):
why not do some other means of propulsion? What's what
did the sea slug ever do to you that you
required to remove the muscle from its mouth and paste
it onto a three D printed robot. Well, let's get
some details first. Uh, the type of sea slug we're
talking about is specifically the Eplesia californica sea slug, and
(17:08):
it is apparently ideal for this particular application, and they
the team plans on using robots like this one. I
would argue that the ones they produced so far are
kind of in that prototype range, but they expect to
use robots like this one in specific environments that would
be hazardous or impossible for humans to explore. An example
(17:31):
would be let's say a plane has gone down over
the ocean, and perhaps it's a deep part of the ocean.
It's very difficult for us to get down there and
search for the black box to determine what exactly happened.
You could deploy a swarm of these robots that could
explore the bottom of the sea floor. Keep in mind
that sea slug muscles, they're they're made made, it's probably
(17:55):
the wrong word. They've evolved to inhabit various ocean environments,
and they're incredibly hardy. The the muscle tissue and sea
slugs they are able to survive in various conditions of
ocean water, different levels of salinity and temperature. So they're
ideal for going into these kind of situations because you
(18:16):
can have them survived through all the different depths of
the ocean as they make their way to where you
want them to go. Then they explore the ocean floor
looking for this black box. When they find it, you know,
you get the signal and then you can actually send
in something to retrieve the box. That's one example. Another
one that they gave is imagine that you have a
pond and you know that there's some toxic material leaching
(18:38):
into the pond. You do not know what the source
is or where it is, but you are observing ecological
changes around the pond. So you don't want to send
a person in there because it could be the levels
of toxicity could be dangerous to the human beings. So
you put in these robots that are capable of moving
through the water to seek out the sore and then
(19:01):
maybe you can do something about it. Those are some
of the examples they've given. Well. Uh the interesting thing
about using a ce slug muscle as opposed to a
three D printed um uh or or traditional type of that. Yeah,
it's using something like that. Well, for one thing, like
if you're using actuators, they tend to be stiff and inflexible.
(19:23):
They they aren't good at adapting to various environments, and
that also means that they have limited range of motion, right,
Like they might have a very simple action like a
piston would be a very simple action in or out right.
So if you want to create a limb that has
a lot of flexibility to it, you end up having
to use a lot of actuators, which ends up adding
(19:46):
to the complexity of the robot itself. It increases the
number of potential points of failure. It also increases the
cost of developing and building those robots. And it's not
easy to create something that's very adaptive to its environment,
whereas using a muscle or from a creature that lived
in that environment gets around those problems. Muscles are much
(20:07):
more flexible. Uh, they're very this particular sea slug, it's
very resilient, like I mentioned before, so you don't have
to worry so much about failure In that case, um
and the muscle tissue itself can get nutrients from the
ocean water around it to keep the muscle alive. Now
that doesn't power the muscle, as in, it doesn't generate
(20:30):
the ability for the muscle to contract. You still have
to at the moment anyway stimulate it with an external
electric field. They do hope to eventually develop other organic
based robots using this uh the sea slugs muscularture, but
also including other parts of the sea slugs nervous system
like anglia and stuff. In order for it to be
(20:54):
able to move without using an external electric field, you
would have some other control mechanism to make the robot
move when you want it to move, which would be
important because trying to stimulate a swarm of robots deep
under the ocean with an electric field would present its
own challenges, right You that that it's not a practical
(21:17):
solution to the problems that we're actually talking about these
robots potentially tackling in the future. And uh, I love
the idea that they eventually want to create essentially an
entirely organic robot, so no inorganic parts. It's all yeah
(21:38):
meat robot, which by the way, is is pretty much
the way Catereral Capec envisioned robots and Rossum's universal robots.
They were synthetic beings but they were not necessarily electronic beings.
The robots and Carol Capex play were closer to the
like the replicants in uh In Blade Run or and
(22:00):
even more organic than they were, at least in most
of the variations I've read of the play. I've never
read it in the original because I can't I don't
have that linguistic ability. But they at any rate, they
wanted to do a fully organic robot, the idea being
that if you lose them, like if they if through
(22:21):
whatever means, like they're going through a hazardous area and
eventually they break down, they would decompose naturally, or they
could even be eaten by stuff in the environment, that is,
and not cause harm. This almost reminds me in some
ways of when we talked about edible electronics, like wanting
to make electronic devices entirely out of components that you
(22:42):
could digest safely. Sure, because yeah, if you're gonna accidentally
pollute a waterway, it's nicer to do it with a good,
friendly corpse than with electronics which have batteries that can
you know it's bad times of battery leaks into your water, right,
just making the problem worse. I hope fully, the synthetic
organic what are the terms completely organic robots would be
(23:06):
sterile correct, Well, I mean they from what I understand,
they would be still completely controlled. Externally, they would have
they would have no uh autonomous function whatsoever, so they
wouldn't contain the reproductive bits. Yeah, you would essentially just
have it. You would just have an inert robot if
you weren't, if you weren't using that external control. Be like,
(23:30):
you know, if you had a remote control car and
there's no wireless frequency going on around that car, it's
not going to start moving on its own unless it's tobor. Granted,
if Tobar has been reincarnated as an RC car, you
might have some problems. I think we just came up
with a plot for Toy Story five. Pixar call us, yes,
(23:53):
please do? I mean generally, yeah, Well, we'd love to
talk to you. I love the idea of a completely
organic row bot. I think that's hilarious and it's it's
something that should encourage us to be thoughtful. Look as
what what is a robot in that sense? So you
say a robot is something it's a machine that uh
that in well, actually, I mean there are different definitions. Well,
(24:17):
if you can, you go with the classic definition, the
Carol Capeck definition, where you had organic robots. A robot
is a synthetic being humans have built in order for
it to do work that humans do not want to
do or cannot do. And in the case of Rossam's
universal robots, you have these synthetic beings that rebel against
(24:39):
that because in that sense, robot is essentially a slave.
It's just it's an artificial being that's been created by people,
but still has this feeling of of well, I am
being forced to do this work, it was not on
my own volition. So same sort of idea for robots
in general, except we've met largely not gone the organic route,
(25:00):
except in a few odd cases here and there, and
by odd I mean infrequent h and also sometimes sometimes
kind of unusual and weird. But we've mostly focused on
the electronic version of robots, right, the technological version of robots.
So I would argue that this definition goes right back
(25:21):
to the heart of the original definition. It's a synthetic machine,
whether it's organic or inorganic, that is meant to do
work that we humans are either unable or unwilling to do. Ourselves,
That's what I would say. All right, well, under that definition,
I mean, if you could imagine a scenario where we
synthetically create a dog and it is, you know, pretty
(25:45):
much like any other dog, except you've grown all of
its organs in a in vitro and then combined them
to make a functioning dog. I mean, should should our
attitude towards this organism be any different than it would
be towards a naturally occurring dog. Birth to two dogs?
As an excellent question, I don't. I mean, obviously, it's
(26:09):
one of those that I think people would come up
with their own individual answers. The fact that you chose
dog which hits our super soft spot. For me, I'll
be like, well, I mean, if it's it's like the
you know, if it looks like a duck and if
it quacks like a duck, that it's good enough for me.
It's sort of the same thing. Except if it looks
like a duck and quacks like a duck. I'm not
going to call it a dog, Joe. That's stupid, that
(26:31):
would be absurd. Yes, um would? I mean, I don't know,
like I think that we shouldn't morally speaking treat this
cyber dog with any difference than than we would treat
a regular dog. But but I think we would well,
and I think it's human nature to look at that
and runaway screaming, and well, if it looks like Frank
(26:53):
and dog, then definitely, well okay, So here's the thing.
I mean, it seems to me that the crucial bit
there would be the nervous system. Like if it has
a nervous system, you wouldn't feel okay to even a
dog you grew in vitro. If you grew a brain
for it and it worked like a normal dog brain,
I know, I wouldn't feel okay, like sending that dog
into a dangerous situation or something like that. That's still
(27:16):
a dog. Yeah, But I mean, if you're growing organic robots,
it seems like you will need some sort of nervous
system type type apparatus to control it. Which it gets
into what they were talking about with future future versions
of it. Well yeah, and and it would all depend
on like how sophisticated a nervous system are you talking about?
(27:38):
You talking about something that would allow enough for someone
else to have external control of the the robot, whether
it's organic or in organic if you're going to make
the muscles move, you need a nervous system. Yeah, but
I mean, is it one that is capable now having
any sort of experience or is it simply going to
be one that follows the instructions that you give it
(27:58):
in real time? Another words, is it more like a
remote controlled object or is it able to do anything
semi or or fully autonomously. The closer you get to autonomous,
I would argue, the more you're gonna have to treat
that as a living thing, whether it's organic or inorganic.
I feel that way. Um oh yeah, you know, which
(28:20):
we discussed at length the other week in our Robotic
Personhood episode right right, and and we've even talked about
it in previous episodes where we've mentioned the idea that
if a robot is capable of simulating behaviors that are
are that we associate with organic beings, that living natural creatures.
(28:41):
If the more it's able to exhibit those sort of behaviors,
even if it's just a simulation, it may be for
our own personal benefit to treat the robots as if
they are in fact natural creatures. Uh, this would be like,
you know, it's kind of a weird thing to think about,
but it's almost better for for human being psychologically to
(29:04):
treat robots that would exhibit such behaviors as if they
were alive, even if you could argue that the robot
itself somehow, you know, empirically, isn't alive at any rate.
That's so much further down the road than simply attaching
a c slug muscle to a piece of three D
printed um material. If people are talking about creating entirely
(29:30):
organic robots, I think that's something we need to be
thinking about. Yeah, eventually, Yeah, I think the initial organic
robots are essentially going to be the organic counterpart to
a remote controlled car. It's not gonna be any more
sophisticated than a microprocessor that would allow a radio signal
to be translated into physical motion. Yeah, and that actually
(29:54):
is an excellent tie in into our our next subject
in this episode, which is synthetic sting rays. Yes, so wait,
is this closer to the like a stingray modified with
predator vision or more like a pig long It's more
like a pig lung. Uh, It's it's a it's a
robot powered by living tissue. Up. But I would say
(30:16):
that it's design principles could lead to the modification of
organisms in the future. I will explain. So, a team
out of Harvard University has built a synthetic sting ray
that can swim around and be stimulated to move by
exposure to these little blue lights. Why is stingray you
ask with your eyeballs. Um, Because it's an organism that
(30:36):
has a powerful and efficient muscular system that has the
capacity to act and react in moving fluids when it swims. Yes, um,
And and basically, our circulatory system is a system of
moving fluids that acts and reacts to stimuli via a
powerful and efficient muscular system. A k A your heart.
(31:00):
Are you about to tell me that we're going to
eventually have synthetic sting rays swimming through our blood streams?
Because I didn't prepare myself for that eventuality. No, okay,
all right, I could take a breath then. But their
thought was that if we can create a synthetic stingray,
then maybe we can create better artificial hearts. Oh how interesting.
(31:22):
I never would have made that connection. Yeah, the connection
was was made by the team leader, one Kit Parker Um,
who's it's the same team that created an artificial jellyfish
back in and this Parker Fellow has been inspired by
aquarium visits with his daughter and and also by his
frustration with with the lack of really good artificial hearts
(31:44):
in our in our current medical culture, when we do
have lots of examples of things living things that beat
and pump in nature. Uh, you know what, why don't
Why don't we have a better hearts? Um? So he
sees he sees projects like this jellyfish and the stingray
as ways to help develop better human biotechnology. That's so interesting,
(32:07):
But he does it in real creepy ways, mad science style.
I mean a little bit. I mean, I don't know.
It depends on how far you played up and how
how much you choose to be squeaked out by it.
But okay, Like, did I mention that the stingray and
the jellyfish are powered by rat heart cells? You mentioned
they had biological material, but didn't mention that they were
(32:28):
they were deriving their power from rat hearts. I want
to I want to give you guys. I want to
give you guys a quote. Um there. Parker did this
interview with NPR, and in it he was talking about
sitting down with one of his fellow researchers and explaining
this plan and so and so Parker says, I said,
we're going to take a rat apart, we're going to
(32:49):
rebuild it as a stingray, and then we're going to
use a light to guide it. And then Parker says,
and the look on his face was both sorrow and horror. Yeah,
this that sounds like it comes straight out of like
a B movie, like horror film, right like that? You know,
it reminds me of an episode of The Mighty Bush
(33:11):
where it's called Mutants and it's all about the owner
of the zoo, in order to attract more people to
the zoo, decides to take apart all the animals and
put them back together in weird ways because that will
attract a bigger crowd, Lauren, wasn't this the story that
was behind Miss Quimby and the Rats of nim Good reference?
(33:33):
But you know the name of the missing rat, right,
the husband rat. You know what his first name was, right, Jonathan?
But only in the book. I don't think he's mentioned that.
Maybe he's mentioned that way in the movie too. Yeah,
it's been a long time since I've seen the rats
of nim or read the book, so I can't say
(33:55):
that I recall specifically. Uh but furthermore, Parker Parker went
on to program these these living, disembodied rat heart cells
to propel plastic stingray bodies through the water, always heading
towards the light. I just want to shake this dude's hand. Yeah,
(34:17):
there's like every every horror movie I've ever seen has
been wrapped up in the story. Somehow we got some
poulter Geist in there, you know, we got Frankenstein and
but but but it is. It is a fascinating technological,
biotechnological approach to a to a problem. Uh so, so
what what they did exactly was they took about two
(34:38):
thousand rat heart cells um genetically altered them to react
to this pair of of of blinky blue lights and
fitted them into a little silicone stingray shaped body that
has this thin, tiny gold skeleton. UM. The whole thing
is a little bit less than an inch in diameter,
like like twenty millimeters or so, about the size of
(34:58):
a US nickel and UM and and the living cells
in it are fit together in patterns that allow them
to be stimulated sequentially. UM. It's sort of like you know,
the wave in a baseball stadium. Uh, you know when
when when everyone this is such a visual thing and
I was like about to do it to show you
guys on air. That's not efficient, but it would have
(35:19):
been a very small but enthusiastic wave. Yes, I don't
think we could. We could do a good wave in
here anyway. Um uh so yeah, so so so insequential patterns, um,
and by giving the giving the little synthetic creature different
light inputs, like by modulating the frequency of the flashes,
(35:40):
and by acting by by activating either both lights simultaneously
or only the right side or only the left side. Um,
they've guided this little stingray buddy through an obstacle course,
and yeah, it moves like a real sting ray. Well
it makes sense that they would have to have it
in this sort of modulated fashion. After all. That's the
(36:01):
way that if you watch a sting ray swimming in
slow motion, you see that sort of like a ripple
effect through its musculature as it propels itself through. So yeah,
it's really cool. Yeah, And what they're hoping will come
out of this research eventually is an artificial heart made
with real living muscle cells. Um, you know, rather than
(36:21):
being just just a mechanical pump or even you know,
a fancy mechanical pump that's outfitted with sensories that can
react to blood pressure. Um, this kind of artificial heart
could grow and change and react more like real hearts do. Right.
That makes perfect sense. So if for example, a child
were to need a heart transplant, uh, and you didn't
(36:43):
have and a donor is an available, you didn't have
a donor available, and you don't necessarily want to uh
fit an artificial mechanical heart because growing child, right, because
then you may have to do future surgeries to correct
for that later on. This is an alternative approach that
could be incredibly helpful for those sort of cases in particular,
(37:08):
a lot of different cases obviously. Oh yeah, yeah, well,
I mean, I mean heart hearts are muscles that that
grow and change very much with us, depending on how
much exercise we're doing and uh and other other lifestyle factors.
So yeah, it could be it could be huge, all right.
So we have these these two different examples of incorporating
biological material into a synthetic robot of some sort, whether
(37:32):
and different plans for either approaching this to create more
organic robots in the future, as is the case with
a c slug, or to develop technologies that are inspired by,
but not necessarily easily linked to on on a surface level,
to a synthetic creature the case of the stingray. What
(37:54):
about the future of cyborgs? This is obviously very uh
early days in in that kind of realm. What are
we seeing moving forward? Well, in some ways, if you
think about it, humans are already sort of cyborg is
with our contact lenses and our pacemakers and our Pokemon
(38:16):
go machines. But I was kidding about that last one.
But yeah, you might be. But you know, I'm I'm
gonna catch that gush darn sid duck that's been haunting
the office for the last twenty five minutes. There's a
side duck in the office right now. No, there's not.
Why would you lie to my Jonathans? It was germane
to what Joe was saying, really just for the purposes
(38:38):
of entertainment. I I feel very ashamed, and having gotten
your hopes up, Jonathan is going to create a side
duck dynasty in here. I'm trying to grow out the
beard anyway, but so so there's already the human case.
But I mean, we've talked about human modification before, and
in many cases, I think it's interesting to think about
how biohybrid animals and cyborg animals may proceed cyborg or
(39:05):
biohybrid humans. Yeah, they're still going to be I imagine
a lot of ethical considerations even with the idea of
transforming animals in different ways, especially the more complex the organism.
I I imagine the more ethical questions we will ask ourselves.
But it seems to me that it's far more likely
we're going to to see examples of that in and
(39:28):
even complex organisms. Well before we get to a point
where it is widely accepted within human culture, we'll we'll
still have maybe one or two people who are seeking
out the opportunity to enhance themselves on an individual basis,
but those will be outliers, not like this is a
(39:48):
general trend. We're gonna see lots of people following well,
And as we've discussed on the show before, there are
so many, um like legally ethical questions and and and
hurdles to too mechanically jump over. I'm not sure where
I was going with that. But before we have doctors
with the legal capacity to make that kind of upgrade. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
(40:12):
But it's it's interesting to think, well, assuming we do
reach a future where more complex organisms can be altered
into some form of cyborg whether you're changing an existing
animal or you're developing a brand new type of animal
from scratch. Uh, you know, and maybe a type of
(40:33):
animal that completely resembles an existing one but is in
fact like lab made as opposed to we we found
this puppy and decided to give it infrared vision with
cyborg eyes. Uh what what are some of the things
we might see? I like, I like that you have
the idea of augmenting animals to make them easier to
(40:57):
care for. Well, yeah, I mean that's a thing that
in some ways already exists. I mean, people have wearables
for animals that are meant for health tracking purposes of
various kinds. I think they're probably kind of crude today,
But and we do have GPS tracking chips and a
lot of our and like like i D tags and
a lot of our animals. Yeah, yeah, it's true pets
(41:18):
with tracking capabilities. Now, your dog might very well already
have an embedded microchip with like identifying information in case
that dog gets caught. But you wouldn't call that integrated system, right,
It's it's a tag that's underneath the skin of the animal,
but doesn't integrate within the dog's actual internal organs or anything. Well,
(41:40):
a version that might do something like that was imagine
something like this pets with built in range limitters, so
kind of like the principle behind a collar and an
electric fence combo. So you can let your pet roam free,
but they get within a certain range distance of your
hub on the GPS coordinates, the pet has gone too far,
(42:01):
and it gets some kind of internal control mechanism telling
it to turn back right, like it suddenly gets uneasy
or hungry or terrified and now I want to go
home and hug my dog, or you know, maybe it
could simulate, you know, it gets a certain distance away,
(42:23):
there's suddenly the simulated sensation of hearing the food bowl
rattle back at home or something. But in less cute
and cuddly ways, you could have like spy animals for
warfare and espionage. I'm sure that you can upgrade in
all kinds of bizarre cybernetically, yes, I mean you can
still have it cute and Cuddley if it's like a
Jack Russell right right. If you guys ever want to
(42:45):
read something real depressing um and and you are of
an adult age, then then pick up the graphic novel
WE three W E and the number three that's by
Grant Morrison and it's real sad. It's if you want
be real sad someday and read a real great story
about that thing that we just talked about. Check that
one out, Okay, I always want to be real sad.
(43:08):
I highly recommended. Actually, it's one of my favorite little
one shots anyway. But those are the more standard types
of things. I mean, you can think of things like
this yourself, right, and you know, what's a way we
can modify a pet or organism to have some kind
of control function augmented by technology. But I think one
of the interesting things is that in the examples we
(43:28):
look today, it's more the pig lung model. It's coming
from the other direction, not modifying a whole organism with
a little bit of technology, but using an organ from
an animal or or you know, just some kind of
biological material that is incorporated into a machine or a robot.
And so there are lots of cases where we've studied biomemetics,
(43:51):
which is, you know, designing machines and robots to mimic
the behaviors of living organisms and tissues. But in a
lot of these cases, it's probably worth asking, now, hey,
if we want a robot that can do the same
thing as a squid tentnacle, is there a reason we
shouldn't just use a squid tentnacle. I'm I'm sure that
if squids could talk, they would have something to say
(44:12):
about that. Well. True, imagine you could grow one in vitro. Okay,
well we'll skip that part. Uh, I'm not saying you
could grow as squid tentnacle in vitro without having to
have any harm come to an actual squid. Sure, while
you're eating your calamari, I'm saving them so much suffering. Uh,
(44:33):
I'm sorry, it didn't mean to sound so callous there. No,
I'm just having a shellfish issue. In many cases, this
is going to be impractical, right, Like maybe you can't
actually control the biological tentacle with precision, or maybe it
tends to rot or decompose in the environment that you
would want to use it. But in some cases, the
(44:55):
real tissue or organ might do just as well as
the synthetic copy at which would save us a lot
of R and D. Right, Yeah, it makes me think
of remember the snake like robot that could swim through
a pool and climb trees and stuff. This was from
a few years ago, where it's like the segment of
robot and yeah, bio mimetic. It was, you know, mimicking
(45:17):
the movements of a snake in order to propel itself
through both water and over land, uh and up trees
as it turns out, And you would imagine that, Yeah,
that's that's probably pretty tricky, a tough engineering challenge. If
we reached a point where we were able to either
take an existing snake or grow as a snake essentially
(45:39):
a snake sands near uh sands snake brain in the lab,
and replace that with like a technological version of whatever
is we need in a control system that kind of thing. Uh,
that might end up being much easier. And depending upon
what you were planning on putting that snake robot to use,
you know, however you're playing on using it, it may
(46:00):
end up being more practical in that In that respect. Um,
obviously there's a lot of work that has to go
into making that actually happen, like you were saying, with
the idea of the precision, making sure that you can
get all those movements just right. Uh. As we mentioned
before on this show, when it comes to living organisms,
(46:21):
they have had the benefit of millions and millions of
years of research and development to get to where they
are today. We yeah, we've been working on a much
smaller time scale, not even a blip in the grand
scheme of things. So it's it's not like I don't
wish to say, like, oh, yeah, if we just did
(46:43):
it this way, it would make way more sense, because
it is in itself a monumental task. It just maybe
that in certain cases it ends up making more sense
to go down that road than trying to replicate the
movement of a particular organism through purely mechanical means. Yeah,
and so here's just one example that comes to my mind. Uh,
(47:04):
animal organs often can do the same job a machine
can do, but with a lot greater energy efficiency. This
is a great one. Like, uh, it's a very sci
fi concept, But just stick with me for a second. Here.
Imagine we're going to create some neurally inspired computing robots,
robots that have some brain power, uh, and they they've
(47:25):
got you know, neural network kind of logic, why not
use real neurons to do the computation. Animal nervous systems
are known to be much more energy efficient relative to
their computing capability than electronic processors are. So if you're
trying to create a robot that's maybe both small and smart,
(47:45):
it would make a lot of sense to try and
see if you could use organic nervous system neural material
rather than processors, you know, silicon chips. So the big
challenge there is creating the interface that allows for the
technological commands to be converted into organic commands or organic
(48:09):
requests in the case of something like you wanted to
do some sort of machine learning type of situation. Well,
this is a very sci fi kind of thing, and
we're not close to to do anything like this today,
but it is is an interesting concept. I like the idea, especially,
you know, if you're able to grow neurons in the lab, right,
not not pull it out of an animal. Right. Yeah,
(48:31):
I get real squeaky squeaky about that sort of stuff.
I don't. I'm so I like animals like I like
them I like them as they are, like them with mustard,
depending on the animal. That is true. Um, but yeah,
it's it's but I like the idea of leveraging that
incredibly efficient, powerful unit that collectively can create a really
(48:57):
uh robust network as opposed to trying to replicate it
through technology, which requires not just more energy but a
lot more space too. We've gotten really good at minaturization,
but nowhere near on the level of like how deadly
packed our brains are with neurons. So it is an
interesting idea. I don't know if we'll ever get there.
(49:19):
I mean it'll It really will depend on which branch
of research ends up being the most economically feasible, at
least in the short run. Right Like if you say, well,
we could pour more money into research on the true
neural network side of things, where we're actually using neurons,
but we're so far away from that, we think we're
(49:40):
so many decades away from that being a viable discipline.
Whereas while this other approach clearly is less energy efficient
in the in the end result, we're closer to being
able to do that. And maybe it will be that
the other method is one we never explore it's just
a branch where we we identify it but realize, like
it just not practical for us to go down that road.
(50:02):
I mean, someone will, like a mad scientist version of
Robert Frost take the road less traveled. That will make
all the difference. All right, So that wraps up this discussion. Fact.
You know, that's one of the most misinterpreted poems in English.
As a as a fellow liberal arts major, yes I do. Yeah,
(50:24):
you should look it up. Look it up. People read
about it sometimes. This is kind of funny. It's it's
it's misused in inspirational speeches all the time. It's actually
kind of a depressing poem. Most of Robert Frost's poems
are kind of depressing poems. Dark. Yeah, I mean they're
they're they're beautiful and and and they're so simple sounding.
But yeah, but most of them aren't like pleasant. But
(50:46):
if you want a pleasant experience, get an Emily Dickinson
poem and read it to the tune of Gilligan's Island
because it works also Yellow Rose of Texas. They both work.
Um at any rate. I'll with that little bit of
knowledge and trust me, it works. Go and try it.
I'm going to sign off here. If you guys have
suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking, or you have
(51:07):
some questions or comments, send them our away Our email
addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
or you can always drop us a line on Twitter
or Facebook. At Twitter where f W Thinking you can
search f W Thinking, and Facebook's a little search engine
we'll pop right up. You can leave us a message there.
I'm seriously never going to be able to unthink this,
and we will talk to you again really soon. For
(51:35):
more on this topic in the future of technology, visit
forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's
Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks the future and says, you know, I
hate to ask, but our friends electric. I'm Jonathan Strickland
(00:22):
and I'm Joe McCormick. And of course they are all
organisms are electric? Actually is that true? I'm not sure.
Maybe electro chemical. Are they all electric? Maybe not viruses?
That might be one of the weird virus definition issue.
I don't think they're all electric. I think some are hybrids.
That was a terrible joke. All right, Well, let's actually
(00:43):
transition into the introduction for our podcast that doesn't involve
weird word play that doesn't get us anywhere. We're gonna
be talking about, uh, something that we've touched on in
previous episodes, right, cyborgs. No way, we haven't touched on that.
And I've never personally touched us like cyborg. Yeah, but
(01:06):
I would. And furthermore, we have talked a little bit
about cyborgs in the past, or rather about upgrading organisms.
Um back into scemberteen, we did a whole episode about
cyborg cockroaches. It's called biobots. If you want to look
it up. Uh. And we also talked about the possibility
and the ethics of human upgrades way way way back
(01:26):
in March. I wonder what that's like. I can't even
believe anyone was alive. Then it seems so long ago.
Um that one's called cyborg's ethics and you, um, it
just occurred to me. Did we even talk about the
amazing X Files episode were of the cop cop copper phages?
Am I saying that right? Copper pages? I don't know
if we did the Christian and I did in a
(01:46):
stuff to blow your mind episode that we did about
the science of the X Files. I want to say
that at that point, none of us were rewatching the
series and so we probably weren't talking about it, okay,
And then once it all hit Netflix and we started
kind of binge watching X Files episodes, I was kind
of hate watching it. Well, hey, if you have Netflix
(02:07):
and you can go back and watch War the Copper Fadges,
that's like a top five episodes. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's
one of the four that was written by Darren Morrigan.
I might be a huge X Files nerd uh. And
those four that he wrote I think are the best Uh,
he starred or co starred in one of the others
that I really like, called Small Potatoes at any rate,
So we're not talking about Darren Morgan in this episode
(02:28):
X Files that much. But but yes, uh, cybernetic life forms,
life forms that have some extra bits kind of worked in,
and or synthetic life because we also touched on synthetic
life relatively recently. Uh, I don't know, scroll down, see
what you find. Yeah, it's like it's like maybe from
maybe a month back or something. It's pretty recent that
we talked about synthetic life forms. You know, it sounds
(02:51):
no offense to you all. It sounds like we are
already getting a little mushy with the terminology here, Like
what it what is the category distinction we're trying to
create eight about these uh, the joining at the edges
of of technology and life. Let's let's let's clear that
up a little bit. Okay. Uh, this term cyborg, you
(03:11):
probably know it most from the Genclaude van Damme movie
Cyborg directed by Albert Pune, or maybe not. You probably
know it from culture. Cyborg is a term that has
generally come to be understood as some sort of union
between the biological organism and the machine in some way
or another. And I say that generally because there is
(03:32):
a gap between the specialized definition of cyborg and the
common use of the term in culture, right, Like, he's
more a machine now than C slug, twisted and evil. Yeah,
So the term cyborg is a shortening of cybernetic organism.
You might know that much. And it was coined back
in nineteen sixty by Manfred Klein's and Nathan Klein. Their
(03:55):
names sounds similar, but they're not the same, spelled different.
And that that article in nineteen sixty was in the
journal Astronautics and it was called Cyborgs and Space. So
I want to read a quote for you. Go ahead.
If a fish wish to live on land, it could
not readily do. So they're off to a good start,
I think, starting to sell very susical at the very beginning.
(04:17):
If a fish wished to live on land. Uh, If, however,
a particularly intelligent and resourceful fish could be found who
had studied a good deal of biochemistry and physiology, was
a master engineer and cyberneticist, and had excellent lab facilities
available to him, this fish could conceivably have the ability
(04:38):
to design an instrument which would allow him to live
on land and breathe air quite easily in the same manner.
It is becoming apparent that we will in the not
too distant future have sufficient knowledge to design instrumental control
systems which will make it possible for our bodies to
do things which are no less difficult. So specifically, in
(04:59):
this human analogy that they make, they were talking about
space clients in client argue that as humans venture into space,
it's going to be easier to change the human animal
to be better suited to space conditions than it will
be to create earthlike conditions in space for the unaltered human. Interesting,
(05:20):
so they're talking about actually changing human beings in some
form or function, not necessarily, you know, using technology to
compensate for the things we would encounter in space, but
to actually change humans. So that well, yeah, they are
talking about using technology to compensate, but the compensation wouldn't
(05:40):
be external in our environment, integrated into humans as opposed
to like a space suit, right right, and and I'll
be it. This is before space suits existed, right, this
was before there was any human space exploration. Published in
nineteen sixty, the first human space flight. Your Garrands in
nineteen sixty one, so this is before we had any
experien rants whatsoever in this field. But by their definition quote,
(06:03):
the cyborg deliberately incorporates exogynous meaning coming from outside exogenous components,
extending the self regulatory control function of the organism in
order to adapt it to new environments. And this means
that the cyborg is not enslaved to his or her
survival machinery. Uh, the the incorporated survival machinery operates quote
(06:27):
automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create,
to think, and to feel. So in in an interesting
kind of way. I think the emphasis here because people
always think about human cyborgs and the human context is
changing our nature. But the way Clines and Incline here
envisioned it, it it was almost as if it was enabling
(06:51):
us to be more like the kind of creature we
wish to be, you know, the ideal, yeah, trans humanism,
rather than cybern netics the way that we consider maybe
cyborg netics. Yes, well yeah, I mean the emphasis is
on is on not making us different fundamentally, but just
sort of like getting all of the rudimentary survival junk
(07:13):
out of the way, so that our existence can be
focused on the things that really matter. This gets right
to the heart of a lot of different issues we've
talked about on this show that aren't necessarily directly related
to technology. The general basic income, one could argue, is
covering very much the same ground, the idea that once
you have accounted for the necessities, the basic needs of survival,
(07:36):
you free people up to pursue the things that they
value and thus can become better contributors to society overall.
It's the same similar ideas, just a very different kind
of approach to it. Yeah, so in their vision, they'll
remember that this is talking about trying to adapt us
to other environments very specifically, and cyborg came to mean
(07:58):
something much more general role in the parlance of our times.
But originally they were talking very much about space. And
one example to give of modifying the human to live
in space is breathing. So you know, breathing is required
to purge CO two and replenish oxygen. There's no oxygen
in space, you might have heard before, and so clients
(08:21):
clients incline right quote an inverse fuel cell and no,
we we would probably call this a regenerative fuel cell today.
The idea of an inverse fuel cell is it does
the opposite of what a normal fuel cell does, instead
generating electricity through this chemical reaction that you put in
electricity and you get chemicals out. Um, they say, Uh,
(08:42):
an inverse fuel cell capable of reducing CO two to
its components with removal of of the carbon and recirculation
of the oxygen would eliminate the necessity for lung breathing.
Such a system operating either on solar or nuclear energy
would replace the lung make breathing as we know it unnecessary.
(09:02):
Conventional breathing would still be possible should the environment permit it,
discontinuing the fuel cell operation. Also, for quote fluid balance,
they basically recommend a sort of catheter filter IVY circuit. Pleasant. Okay,
what what book does that It's gonna remind me of
(09:23):
like Catch twenty two or something with one tube going
in and one tube going out and the character convinced
that the two tubes are essentially all part of the
same system. Um, yeah, that's so well. Anyway, given this
stricter understanding in the light of the original definition, that
there is really a distinction between cyborgs like as they're
defined here, and other terms you might use like bio
(09:46):
hybrids or bio robots or something like that. So cyborgs
are technically augmented organisms, and these augmentations are designed to
expand the self regulatory control function. As they said a
lot like technological equivalence of homeostasis systems and humans. That said,
I think for the purpose of this episode, we should
(10:07):
probably just accept that most people use cyborg to mean
any kind of hybrid of an organism or robot or machine. Right,
So you could either start from the the perspective of
an organism that you have modified technologically in some way,
or technology that has has uh biological material incorporated into
(10:28):
it in some way exactly. Yeah, So that that brings
up the question of like, what are the what's the
necessary constituent nature of an object that we think of
as a cyborg. So imagine a space pig. Okay, Yeah,
you've got a space pig with an inverse fuel cell
that facilitates lungless respiration. It's a cyborg. This is cyberpig
(10:48):
um and it can use electricity to oxygenate its tissues
and purge c O two in a vacuum without lung breathing.
Isn't that great? Pretty sure? That's the definition of link
hogthrob in pigs and space and keep on. I like
where you're going with this, Okay, But what if hypothetically
you had something sort of coming from the opposite end
of the spectrum. There's a mechanical fuel cell that uses
(11:11):
a disembodied pig lung to facilitate the generation of electrical current.
Now I'm not sure if you could really do that,
but I'm just saying hypothetically, by the more common understanding,
would this be a cyborg too? Technically yes, yeah, I
mean the original definition probably not. But and we've also
moved from the Muppets to David Cronenberg kind of territory.
(11:31):
But I'm willing to roll with it. Okay. So does
the organic synthetic hybrid system in some sense need to
have a brain or nervous system to be a cyborg?
It seems like, yeah, yeah, it depends. Like like I
would argue that if you were to go back in
time thirty years and talk about the concept of cyborg,
(11:53):
I think a lot of people would would in all fields,
would generally agree that they think of it as as
largely an autonomous sort of thing, that whether it's a
computer brain or an organic brain, that the robotic biological
thing itself would have some form of autonomy. I would
argue today that's not that's no longer a necessary criterion
(12:18):
that you could argue. You could have a cyborg organism.
I guess that's that's being redundant. You could have a
cyborg that the machine exactly and your pin number. You
could have the decisions quote unquote that the cyborg is
making come completely externally through external controls. That I think
(12:40):
would be an acceptable idea today, The idea that that
you've got this organic slash technological thing, but it's under
external control, it has no agency of its own. I
think people would still say, like, well, for lack of
a better unless you're going to go with something like
(13:02):
bio hybrid, or we might as well call it a
cyborg and is so much more fun. It is also
just like you immediately sit there like we're gonna be
talking about ce slug cyborgs very shortly. And when you
sit there and think CE slug cyborg, first thing I
think is that there's like a terminator version of a
sea slug out there. That's not what is actually happening,
(13:23):
but it's way more fun to think of it that
way though. Well, let's get to the slugs. Then we're
gonna come back to some sort of theoretical discussions at
the end. But Jonathan, do you have something to tell
me about slugs? I't. I didn't want it to come
out this way on the podcast. I have a complicated
relationship with slugs. I admit. When I was young, I
(13:46):
had an occasional uh foray into sadism by placing the
salt upon the slugs. I regret those actions. Now as
an adult, I think I did it too. I'm sorry,
but dogs, but these slugs are different. These are sea slugs.
These are not not land based slugs that are gnawing
on the various things you have in your garden. Different
(14:08):
kind of animal, different kind of animal entirely, and can
at you for what you did when you were a kid,
one would hope. I mean, if it holds a grudge,
then they they are far more united than I gave
them credit for. Hopefully we can upgrade their mental powers
through extra computing add ons CA so that way they
don't Yeah, well, the whole thing we're talking about here
(14:30):
is actually a research project done with a team working
with Case Western Reserves Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory, which is
a real thing that exists. It's incredible. Uh. They've developed
an organic robot bio hybrid, or if we prefer our
our other nomenclature, a cyborg that consists of three D
(14:53):
printed parts, very very tiny three D printed parts, and
the mouth muscle from a sea slug. Just the mouth
must just the mouth muscle. They they first started practicing
with muscle cells. They tried to grow muscle cells on
kind of an organic scaffold, but they found that the
actual structure of the mouth muscle from this particular sea
(15:16):
slug was already pretty much exactly what they needed in
order to accomplish the movements they had in mind with
this this three D print material. So, as we talked
about earlier in that analogy, this would be kind of
like the pig lung that facilitates the fuel cell. Yeah,
that in this case, the muscle is there in order
to provide the locomotion of this little robot. It doesn't
(15:39):
have any you know, other anima to it. That's that's
what they're using. The muscle. For it's it's a pusher,
it's a binder. I guess because I think of it
that you've connected two ends of a muscle. This is oversimplifying,
but you've connected two ends of a muscle to two
anchor points on a bendable, flexible three D inted material.
(16:01):
And then when you apply an external electric field. We
know that when you stimulate muscle tissue with low levels
of electricity, you cause it to contract so or or spasm,
depending upon the way to series of contractions. Exactly so,
doing that they can make the muscle contract and thus
bend the bendy three D printed parts, and then you know,
(16:24):
through pulses, they can make the actual robot move forward.
But just to be clear, I mean we sort have
already said this, but I do want to specify there.
We're not talking about like a mechanical thing inspired by
the way the cea slug muscle works, literally just a
CE slug muscle. Yeah, we're talking about, well, why would
you choose a CE slug muscle in the first place, Like,
(16:46):
why not do some other means of propulsion? What's what
did the sea slug ever do to you that you
required to remove the muscle from its mouth and paste
it onto a three D printed robot. Well, let's get
some details first. Uh, the type of sea slug we're
talking about is specifically the Eplesia californica sea slug, and
(17:08):
it is apparently ideal for this particular application, and they
the team plans on using robots like this one. I
would argue that the ones they produced so far are
kind of in that prototype range, but they expect to
use robots like this one in specific environments that would
be hazardous or impossible for humans to explore. An example
(17:31):
would be let's say a plane has gone down over
the ocean, and perhaps it's a deep part of the ocean.
It's very difficult for us to get down there and
search for the black box to determine what exactly happened.
You could deploy a swarm of these robots that could
explore the bottom of the sea floor. Keep in mind
that sea slug muscles, they're they're made made, it's probably
(17:55):
the wrong word. They've evolved to inhabit various ocean environments,
and they're incredibly hardy. The the muscle tissue and sea
slugs they are able to survive in various conditions of
ocean water, different levels of salinity and temperature. So they're
ideal for going into these kind of situations because you
(18:16):
can have them survived through all the different depths of
the ocean as they make their way to where you
want them to go. Then they explore the ocean floor
looking for this black box. When they find it, you know,
you get the signal and then you can actually send
in something to retrieve the box. That's one example. Another
one that they gave is imagine that you have a
pond and you know that there's some toxic material leaching
(18:38):
into the pond. You do not know what the source
is or where it is, but you are observing ecological
changes around the pond. So you don't want to send
a person in there because it could be the levels
of toxicity could be dangerous to the human beings. So
you put in these robots that are capable of moving
through the water to seek out the sore and then
(19:01):
maybe you can do something about it. Those are some
of the examples they've given. Well. Uh the interesting thing
about using a ce slug muscle as opposed to a
three D printed um uh or or traditional type of that. Yeah,
it's using something like that. Well, for one thing, like
if you're using actuators, they tend to be stiff and inflexible.
(19:23):
They they aren't good at adapting to various environments, and
that also means that they have limited range of motion, right,
Like they might have a very simple action like a
piston would be a very simple action in or out right.
So if you want to create a limb that has
a lot of flexibility to it, you end up having
to use a lot of actuators, which ends up adding
(19:46):
to the complexity of the robot itself. It increases the
number of potential points of failure. It also increases the
cost of developing and building those robots. And it's not
easy to create something that's very adaptive to its environment,
whereas using a muscle or from a creature that lived
in that environment gets around those problems. Muscles are much
(20:07):
more flexible. Uh, they're very this particular sea slug, it's
very resilient, like I mentioned before, so you don't have
to worry so much about failure In that case, um
and the muscle tissue itself can get nutrients from the
ocean water around it to keep the muscle alive. Now
that doesn't power the muscle, as in, it doesn't generate
(20:30):
the ability for the muscle to contract. You still have
to at the moment anyway stimulate it with an external
electric field. They do hope to eventually develop other organic
based robots using this uh the sea slugs muscularture, but
also including other parts of the sea slugs nervous system
like anglia and stuff. In order for it to be
(20:54):
able to move without using an external electric field, you
would have some other control mechanism to make the robot
move when you want it to move, which would be
important because trying to stimulate a swarm of robots deep
under the ocean with an electric field would present its
own challenges, right You that that it's not a practical
(21:17):
solution to the problems that we're actually talking about these
robots potentially tackling in the future. And uh, I love
the idea that they eventually want to create essentially an
entirely organic robot, so no inorganic parts. It's all yeah
(21:38):
meat robot, which by the way, is is pretty much
the way Catereral Capec envisioned robots and Rossum's universal robots.
They were synthetic beings but they were not necessarily electronic beings.
The robots and Carol Capex play were closer to the
like the replicants in uh In Blade Run or and
(22:00):
even more organic than they were, at least in most
of the variations I've read of the play. I've never
read it in the original because I can't I don't
have that linguistic ability. But they at any rate, they
wanted to do a fully organic robot, the idea being
that if you lose them, like if they if through
(22:21):
whatever means, like they're going through a hazardous area and
eventually they break down, they would decompose naturally, or they
could even be eaten by stuff in the environment, that is,
and not cause harm. This almost reminds me in some
ways of when we talked about edible electronics, like wanting
to make electronic devices entirely out of components that you
(22:42):
could digest safely. Sure, because yeah, if you're gonna accidentally
pollute a waterway, it's nicer to do it with a good,
friendly corpse than with electronics which have batteries that can
you know it's bad times of battery leaks into your water, right,
just making the problem worse. I hope fully, the synthetic
organic what are the terms completely organic robots would be
(23:06):
sterile correct, Well, I mean they from what I understand,
they would be still completely controlled. Externally, they would have
they would have no uh autonomous function whatsoever, so they
wouldn't contain the reproductive bits. Yeah, you would essentially just
have it. You would just have an inert robot if
you weren't, if you weren't using that external control. Be like,
(23:30):
you know, if you had a remote control car and
there's no wireless frequency going on around that car, it's
not going to start moving on its own unless it's tobor. Granted,
if Tobar has been reincarnated as an RC car, you
might have some problems. I think we just came up
with a plot for Toy Story five. Pixar call us, yes,
(23:53):
please do? I mean generally, yeah, Well, we'd love to
talk to you. I love the idea of a completely
organic row bot. I think that's hilarious and it's it's
something that should encourage us to be thoughtful. Look as
what what is a robot in that sense? So you
say a robot is something it's a machine that uh
that in well, actually, I mean there are different definitions. Well,
(24:17):
if you can, you go with the classic definition, the
Carol Capeck definition, where you had organic robots. A robot
is a synthetic being humans have built in order for
it to do work that humans do not want to
do or cannot do. And in the case of Rossam's
universal robots, you have these synthetic beings that rebel against
(24:39):
that because in that sense, robot is essentially a slave.
It's just it's an artificial being that's been created by people,
but still has this feeling of of well, I am
being forced to do this work, it was not on
my own volition. So same sort of idea for robots
in general, except we've met largely not gone the organic route,
(25:00):
except in a few odd cases here and there, and
by odd I mean infrequent h and also sometimes sometimes
kind of unusual and weird. But we've mostly focused on
the electronic version of robots, right, the technological version of robots.
So I would argue that this definition goes right back
(25:21):
to the heart of the original definition. It's a synthetic machine,
whether it's organic or inorganic, that is meant to do
work that we humans are either unable or unwilling to do. Ourselves,
That's what I would say. All right, well, under that definition,
I mean, if you could imagine a scenario where we
synthetically create a dog and it is, you know, pretty
(25:45):
much like any other dog, except you've grown all of
its organs in a in vitro and then combined them
to make a functioning dog. I mean, should should our
attitude towards this organism be any different than it would
be towards a naturally occurring dog. Birth to two dogs?
As an excellent question, I don't. I mean, obviously, it's
(26:09):
one of those that I think people would come up
with their own individual answers. The fact that you chose
dog which hits our super soft spot. For me, I'll
be like, well, I mean, if it's it's like the
you know, if it looks like a duck and if
it quacks like a duck, that it's good enough for me.
It's sort of the same thing. Except if it looks
like a duck and quacks like a duck. I'm not
going to call it a dog, Joe. That's stupid, that
(26:31):
would be absurd. Yes, um would? I mean, I don't know,
like I think that we shouldn't morally speaking treat this
cyber dog with any difference than than we would treat
a regular dog. But but I think we would well,
and I think it's human nature to look at that
and runaway screaming, and well, if it looks like Frank
(26:53):
and dog, then definitely, well okay, So here's the thing.
I mean, it seems to me that the crucial bit
there would be the nervous system. Like if it has
a nervous system, you wouldn't feel okay to even a
dog you grew in vitro. If you grew a brain
for it and it worked like a normal dog brain,
I know, I wouldn't feel okay, like sending that dog
into a dangerous situation or something like that. That's still
(27:16):
a dog. Yeah, But I mean, if you're growing organic robots,
it seems like you will need some sort of nervous
system type type apparatus to control it. Which it gets
into what they were talking about with future future versions
of it. Well yeah, and and it would all depend
on like how sophisticated a nervous system are you talking about?
(27:38):
You talking about something that would allow enough for someone
else to have external control of the the robot, whether
it's organic or in organic if you're going to make
the muscles move, you need a nervous system. Yeah, but
I mean, is it one that is capable now having
any sort of experience or is it simply going to
be one that follows the instructions that you give it
(27:58):
in real time? Another words, is it more like a
remote controlled object or is it able to do anything
semi or or fully autonomously. The closer you get to autonomous,
I would argue, the more you're gonna have to treat
that as a living thing, whether it's organic or inorganic.
I feel that way. Um oh yeah, you know, which
(28:20):
we discussed at length the other week in our Robotic
Personhood episode right right, and and we've even talked about
it in previous episodes where we've mentioned the idea that
if a robot is capable of simulating behaviors that are
are that we associate with organic beings, that living natural creatures.
(28:41):
If the more it's able to exhibit those sort of behaviors,
even if it's just a simulation, it may be for
our own personal benefit to treat the robots as if
they are in fact natural creatures. Uh, this would be like,
you know, it's kind of a weird thing to think about,
but it's almost better for for human being psychologically to
(29:04):
treat robots that would exhibit such behaviors as if they
were alive, even if you could argue that the robot
itself somehow, you know, empirically, isn't alive at any rate.
That's so much further down the road than simply attaching
a c slug muscle to a piece of three D
printed um material. If people are talking about creating entirely
(29:30):
organic robots, I think that's something we need to be
thinking about. Yeah, eventually, Yeah, I think the initial organic
robots are essentially going to be the organic counterpart to
a remote controlled car. It's not gonna be any more
sophisticated than a microprocessor that would allow a radio signal
to be translated into physical motion. Yeah, and that actually
(29:54):
is an excellent tie in into our our next subject
in this episode, which is synthetic sting rays. Yes, so wait,
is this closer to the like a stingray modified with
predator vision or more like a pig long It's more
like a pig lung. Uh, It's it's a it's a
robot powered by living tissue. Up. But I would say
(30:16):
that it's design principles could lead to the modification of
organisms in the future. I will explain. So, a team
out of Harvard University has built a synthetic sting ray
that can swim around and be stimulated to move by
exposure to these little blue lights. Why is stingray you
ask with your eyeballs. Um, Because it's an organism that
(30:36):
has a powerful and efficient muscular system that has the
capacity to act and react in moving fluids when it swims. Yes, um,
And and basically, our circulatory system is a system of
moving fluids that acts and reacts to stimuli via a
powerful and efficient muscular system. A k A your heart.
(31:00):
Are you about to tell me that we're going to
eventually have synthetic sting rays swimming through our blood streams?
Because I didn't prepare myself for that eventuality. No, okay,
all right, I could take a breath then. But their
thought was that if we can create a synthetic stingray,
then maybe we can create better artificial hearts. Oh how interesting.
(31:22):
I never would have made that connection. Yeah, the connection
was was made by the team leader, one Kit Parker Um,
who's it's the same team that created an artificial jellyfish
back in and this Parker Fellow has been inspired by
aquarium visits with his daughter and and also by his
frustration with with the lack of really good artificial hearts
(31:44):
in our in our current medical culture, when we do
have lots of examples of things living things that beat
and pump in nature. Uh, you know what, why don't
Why don't we have a better hearts? Um? So he
sees he sees projects like this jellyfish and the stingray
as ways to help develop better human biotechnology. That's so interesting,
(32:07):
But he does it in real creepy ways, mad science style.
I mean a little bit. I mean, I don't know.
It depends on how far you played up and how
how much you choose to be squeaked out by it.
But okay, Like, did I mention that the stingray and
the jellyfish are powered by rat heart cells? You mentioned
they had biological material, but didn't mention that they were
(32:28):
they were deriving their power from rat hearts. I want
to I want to give you guys. I want to
give you guys a quote. Um there. Parker did this
interview with NPR, and in it he was talking about
sitting down with one of his fellow researchers and explaining
this plan and so and so Parker says, I said,
we're going to take a rat apart, we're going to
(32:49):
rebuild it as a stingray, and then we're going to
use a light to guide it. And then Parker says,
and the look on his face was both sorrow and horror. Yeah,
this that sounds like it comes straight out of like
a B movie, like horror film, right like that? You know,
it reminds me of an episode of The Mighty Bush
(33:11):
where it's called Mutants and it's all about the owner
of the zoo, in order to attract more people to
the zoo, decides to take apart all the animals and
put them back together in weird ways because that will
attract a bigger crowd, Lauren, wasn't this the story that
was behind Miss Quimby and the Rats of nim Good reference?
(33:33):
But you know the name of the missing rat, right,
the husband rat. You know what his first name was, right, Jonathan?
But only in the book. I don't think he's mentioned that.
Maybe he's mentioned that way in the movie too. Yeah,
it's been a long time since I've seen the rats
of nim or read the book, so I can't say
(33:55):
that I recall specifically. Uh but furthermore, Parker Parker went
on to program these these living, disembodied rat heart cells
to propel plastic stingray bodies through the water, always heading
towards the light. I just want to shake this dude's hand. Yeah,
(34:17):
there's like every every horror movie I've ever seen has
been wrapped up in the story. Somehow we got some
poulter Geist in there, you know, we got Frankenstein and
but but but it is. It is a fascinating technological,
biotechnological approach to a to a problem. Uh so, so
what what they did exactly was they took about two
(34:38):
thousand rat heart cells um genetically altered them to react
to this pair of of of blinky blue lights and
fitted them into a little silicone stingray shaped body that
has this thin, tiny gold skeleton. UM. The whole thing
is a little bit less than an inch in diameter,
like like twenty millimeters or so, about the size of
(34:58):
a US nickel and UM and and the living cells
in it are fit together in patterns that allow them
to be stimulated sequentially. UM. It's sort of like you know,
the wave in a baseball stadium. Uh, you know when
when when everyone this is such a visual thing and
I was like about to do it to show you
guys on air. That's not efficient, but it would have
(35:19):
been a very small but enthusiastic wave. Yes, I don't
think we could. We could do a good wave in
here anyway. Um uh so yeah, so so so insequential patterns, um,
and by giving the giving the little synthetic creature different
light inputs, like by modulating the frequency of the flashes,
(35:40):
and by acting by by activating either both lights simultaneously
or only the right side or only the left side. Um,
they've guided this little stingray buddy through an obstacle course,
and yeah, it moves like a real sting ray. Well
it makes sense that they would have to have it
in this sort of modulated fashion. After all. That's the
(36:01):
way that if you watch a sting ray swimming in
slow motion, you see that sort of like a ripple
effect through its musculature as it propels itself through. So yeah,
it's really cool. Yeah, And what they're hoping will come
out of this research eventually is an artificial heart made
with real living muscle cells. Um, you know, rather than
(36:21):
being just just a mechanical pump or even you know,
a fancy mechanical pump that's outfitted with sensories that can
react to blood pressure. Um, this kind of artificial heart
could grow and change and react more like real hearts do. Right.
That makes perfect sense. So if for example, a child
were to need a heart transplant, uh, and you didn't
(36:43):
have and a donor is an available, you didn't have
a donor available, and you don't necessarily want to uh
fit an artificial mechanical heart because growing child, right, because
then you may have to do future surgeries to correct
for that later on. This is an alternative approach that
could be incredibly helpful for those sort of cases in particular,
(37:08):
a lot of different cases obviously. Oh yeah, yeah, well,
I mean, I mean heart hearts are muscles that that
grow and change very much with us, depending on how
much exercise we're doing and uh and other other lifestyle factors.
So yeah, it could be it could be huge, all right.
So we have these these two different examples of incorporating
biological material into a synthetic robot of some sort, whether
(37:32):
and different plans for either approaching this to create more
organic robots in the future, as is the case with
a c slug, or to develop technologies that are inspired by,
but not necessarily easily linked to on on a surface level,
to a synthetic creature the case of the stingray. What
(37:54):
about the future of cyborgs? This is obviously very uh
early days in in that kind of realm. What are
we seeing moving forward? Well, in some ways, if you
think about it, humans are already sort of cyborg is
with our contact lenses and our pacemakers and our Pokemon
(38:16):
go machines. But I was kidding about that last one.
But yeah, you might be. But you know, I'm I'm
gonna catch that gush darn sid duck that's been haunting
the office for the last twenty five minutes. There's a
side duck in the office right now. No, there's not.
Why would you lie to my Jonathans? It was germane
to what Joe was saying, really just for the purposes
(38:38):
of entertainment. I I feel very ashamed, and having gotten
your hopes up, Jonathan is going to create a side
duck dynasty in here. I'm trying to grow out the
beard anyway, but so so there's already the human case.
But I mean, we've talked about human modification before, and
in many cases, I think it's interesting to think about
how biohybrid animals and cyborg animals may proceed cyborg or
(39:05):
biohybrid humans. Yeah, they're still going to be I imagine
a lot of ethical considerations even with the idea of
transforming animals in different ways, especially the more complex the organism.
I I imagine the more ethical questions we will ask ourselves.
But it seems to me that it's far more likely
we're going to to see examples of that in and
(39:28):
even complex organisms. Well before we get to a point
where it is widely accepted within human culture, we'll we'll
still have maybe one or two people who are seeking
out the opportunity to enhance themselves on an individual basis,
but those will be outliers, not like this is a
(39:48):
general trend. We're gonna see lots of people following well,
And as we've discussed on the show before, there are
so many, um like legally ethical questions and and and
hurdles to too mechanically jump over. I'm not sure where
I was going with that. But before we have doctors
with the legal capacity to make that kind of upgrade. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
(40:12):
But it's it's interesting to think, well, assuming we do
reach a future where more complex organisms can be altered
into some form of cyborg whether you're changing an existing
animal or you're developing a brand new type of animal
from scratch. Uh, you know, and maybe a type of
(40:33):
animal that completely resembles an existing one but is in
fact like lab made as opposed to we we found
this puppy and decided to give it infrared vision with
cyborg eyes. Uh what what are some of the things
we might see? I like, I like that you have
the idea of augmenting animals to make them easier to
(40:57):
care for. Well, yeah, I mean that's a thing that
in some ways already exists. I mean, people have wearables
for animals that are meant for health tracking purposes of
various kinds. I think they're probably kind of crude today,
But and we do have GPS tracking chips and a
lot of our and like like i D tags and
a lot of our animals. Yeah, yeah, it's true pets
(41:18):
with tracking capabilities. Now, your dog might very well already
have an embedded microchip with like identifying information in case
that dog gets caught. But you wouldn't call that integrated system, right,
It's it's a tag that's underneath the skin of the animal,
but doesn't integrate within the dog's actual internal organs or anything. Well,
(41:40):
a version that might do something like that was imagine
something like this pets with built in range limitters, so
kind of like the principle behind a collar and an
electric fence combo. So you can let your pet roam free,
but they get within a certain range distance of your
hub on the GPS coordinates, the pet has gone too far,
(42:01):
and it gets some kind of internal control mechanism telling
it to turn back right, like it suddenly gets uneasy
or hungry or terrified and now I want to go
home and hug my dog, or you know, maybe it
could simulate, you know, it gets a certain distance away,
(42:23):
there's suddenly the simulated sensation of hearing the food bowl
rattle back at home or something. But in less cute
and cuddly ways, you could have like spy animals for
warfare and espionage. I'm sure that you can upgrade in
all kinds of bizarre cybernetically, yes, I mean you can
still have it cute and Cuddley if it's like a
Jack Russell right right. If you guys ever want to
(42:45):
read something real depressing um and and you are of
an adult age, then then pick up the graphic novel
WE three W E and the number three that's by
Grant Morrison and it's real sad. It's if you want
be real sad someday and read a real great story
about that thing that we just talked about. Check that
one out, Okay, I always want to be real sad.
(43:08):
I highly recommended. Actually, it's one of my favorite little
one shots anyway. But those are the more standard types
of things. I mean, you can think of things like
this yourself, right, and you know, what's a way we
can modify a pet or organism to have some kind
of control function augmented by technology. But I think one
of the interesting things is that in the examples we
(43:28):
look today, it's more the pig lung model. It's coming
from the other direction, not modifying a whole organism with
a little bit of technology, but using an organ from
an animal or or you know, just some kind of
biological material that is incorporated into a machine or a robot.
And so there are lots of cases where we've studied biomemetics,
(43:51):
which is, you know, designing machines and robots to mimic
the behaviors of living organisms and tissues. But in a
lot of these cases, it's probably worth asking, now, hey,
if we want a robot that can do the same
thing as a squid tentnacle, is there a reason we
shouldn't just use a squid tentnacle. I'm I'm sure that
if squids could talk, they would have something to say
(44:12):
about that. Well. True, imagine you could grow one in vitro. Okay,
well we'll skip that part. Uh, I'm not saying you
could grow as squid tentnacle in vitro without having to
have any harm come to an actual squid. Sure, while
you're eating your calamari, I'm saving them so much suffering. Uh,
(44:33):
I'm sorry, it didn't mean to sound so callous there. No,
I'm just having a shellfish issue. In many cases, this
is going to be impractical, right, Like maybe you can't
actually control the biological tentacle with precision, or maybe it
tends to rot or decompose in the environment that you
would want to use it. But in some cases, the
(44:55):
real tissue or organ might do just as well as
the synthetic copy at which would save us a lot
of R and D. Right, Yeah, it makes me think
of remember the snake like robot that could swim through
a pool and climb trees and stuff. This was from
a few years ago, where it's like the segment of
robot and yeah, bio mimetic. It was, you know, mimicking
(45:17):
the movements of a snake in order to propel itself
through both water and over land, uh and up trees
as it turns out, And you would imagine that, Yeah,
that's that's probably pretty tricky, a tough engineering challenge. If
we reached a point where we were able to either
take an existing snake or grow as a snake essentially
(45:39):
a snake sands near uh sands snake brain in the lab,
and replace that with like a technological version of whatever
is we need in a control system that kind of thing. Uh,
that might end up being much easier. And depending upon
what you were planning on putting that snake robot to use,
you know, however you're playing on using it, it may
(46:00):
end up being more practical in that In that respect. Um,
obviously there's a lot of work that has to go
into making that actually happen, like you were saying, with
the idea of the precision, making sure that you can
get all those movements just right. Uh. As we mentioned
before on this show, when it comes to living organisms,
(46:21):
they have had the benefit of millions and millions of
years of research and development to get to where they
are today. We yeah, we've been working on a much
smaller time scale, not even a blip in the grand
scheme of things. So it's it's not like I don't
wish to say, like, oh, yeah, if we just did
(46:43):
it this way, it would make way more sense, because
it is in itself a monumental task. It just maybe
that in certain cases it ends up making more sense
to go down that road than trying to replicate the
movement of a particular organism through purely mechanical means. Yeah,
and so here's just one example that comes to my mind. Uh,
(47:04):
animal organs often can do the same job a machine
can do, but with a lot greater energy efficiency. This
is a great one. Like, uh, it's a very sci
fi concept, But just stick with me for a second. Here.
Imagine we're going to create some neurally inspired computing robots,
robots that have some brain power, uh, and they they've
(47:25):
got you know, neural network kind of logic, why not
use real neurons to do the computation. Animal nervous systems
are known to be much more energy efficient relative to
their computing capability than electronic processors are. So if you're
trying to create a robot that's maybe both small and smart,
(47:45):
it would make a lot of sense to try and
see if you could use organic nervous system neural material
rather than processors, you know, silicon chips. So the big
challenge there is creating the interface that allows for the
technological commands to be converted into organic commands or organic
(48:09):
requests in the case of something like you wanted to
do some sort of machine learning type of situation. Well,
this is a very sci fi kind of thing, and
we're not close to to do anything like this today,
but it is is an interesting concept. I like the idea, especially,
you know, if you're able to grow neurons in the lab, right,
not not pull it out of an animal. Right. Yeah,
(48:31):
I get real squeaky squeaky about that sort of stuff.
I don't. I'm so I like animals like I like
them I like them as they are, like them with mustard,
depending on the animal. That is true. Um, but yeah,
it's it's but I like the idea of leveraging that
incredibly efficient, powerful unit that collectively can create a really
(48:57):
uh robust network as opposed to trying to replicate it
through technology, which requires not just more energy but a
lot more space too. We've gotten really good at minaturization,
but nowhere near on the level of like how deadly
packed our brains are with neurons. So it is an
interesting idea. I don't know if we'll ever get there.
(49:19):
I mean it'll It really will depend on which branch
of research ends up being the most economically feasible, at
least in the short run. Right Like if you say, well,
we could pour more money into research on the true
neural network side of things, where we're actually using neurons,
but we're so far away from that, we think we're
(49:40):
so many decades away from that being a viable discipline.
Whereas while this other approach clearly is less energy efficient
in the in the end result, we're closer to being
able to do that. And maybe it will be that
the other method is one we never explore it's just
a branch where we we identify it but realize, like
it just not practical for us to go down that road.
(50:02):
I mean, someone will, like a mad scientist version of
Robert Frost take the road less traveled. That will make
all the difference. All right, So that wraps up this discussion. Fact.
You know, that's one of the most misinterpreted poems in English.
As a as a fellow liberal arts major, yes I do. Yeah,
(50:24):
you should look it up. Look it up. People read
about it sometimes. This is kind of funny. It's it's
it's misused in inspirational speeches all the time. It's actually
kind of a depressing poem. Most of Robert Frost's poems
are kind of depressing poems. Dark. Yeah, I mean they're
they're they're beautiful and and and they're so simple sounding.
But yeah, but most of them aren't like pleasant. But
(50:46):
if you want a pleasant experience, get an Emily Dickinson
poem and read it to the tune of Gilligan's Island
because it works also Yellow Rose of Texas. They both work.
Um at any rate. I'll with that little bit of
knowledge and trust me, it works. Go and try it.
I'm going to sign off here. If you guys have
suggestions for future episodes of forward Thinking, or you have
(51:07):
some questions or comments, send them our away Our email
addresses f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
or you can always drop us a line on Twitter
or Facebook. At Twitter where f W Thinking you can
search f W Thinking, and Facebook's a little search engine
we'll pop right up. You can leave us a message there.
I'm seriously never going to be able to unthink this,
and we will talk to you again really soon. For
(51:35):
more on this topic in the future of technology, visit
forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's
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Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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