New research field, necrobotics uses spider corpses to create robots
Despite the outrage caused by such news, how willingly are we to give up on our privileges and comforts after realizing many of them come at the cost of other beings' suffering?
Maybe you already heard about this field in robotics called soft robotics, which aims to design robots with an anatomy similar to living beings, mostly animals. Unlike regular robots, which are made of rigid parts, soft robotics use other materials that are more adaptable and flexible, similar to biological components like muscles and tendons, for example.
This approach of creating new technologies after nature’s design is known as biomimetic and it has a long history if we consider that even planes are designed after birds’ bodies. The news is that now scientists are literally using the biological bodies of some animals to perform robotic tasks or even to create new “beings”, like DNA-based nanorobots.
Using corpses is however a much more recent strategy and it was named necrobotics on the last July, when researchers from Rice University published a paper about an experiment they performed with dead spiders. By applying pressurized air in the dead animal’s legs, the scientists were able to recreate the movements of robotic pincers.
With muscles that only work for retraction, spider legs stretch through a hydraulic mechanism of blood chambers that expand and contract according to the animals’ movement. However, when the spider dies, these valves lose their pressure — that’s why spiders have their legs constricted when they are dead.
By stimulating this mechanism in the spider corpse, these scientists were able to use the bodies to perform small-scale collecting and placing tasks, as well as lifting other spiders — bare in mind that, when alive, spiders can lift objects that are as heavy as 130% of their own weight. Still, this is a very hard process and since they are dealing with biological components (therefore biodegradable), only an average of 1,000 cycles of activity were registered before the system deteriorated. That is a very low average if you consider the demands of an actual production line.
Despite being a very questionable experiment from the ethical and moral perspectives, this technology is also not efficient. While some researchers try to outline the ethical thresholds of biomimetics, for example, others argue that this is just another manifestation of what we have been doing for centuries whenever we wear animal fur or use animal parts as tools and food.
As a matter of fact, in 2015, other scientists have already done a similar experiment but with living animals. At that time, they implanted a chip in the central nervous system of cockroaches, thus being able to control them remotely. Later on, these same scientists created solar backpacks to recharge the battery of these implants, thus extending the life cycle of this system which could be used, for instance, to find victims in the case of disasters. Never before the movie Joe and the Cockroaches felt so real.
In face of such studies, it is even clearer that the next step would be to try these same things in mammals and ultimately humans. In fact, by the beginning of this year a neural implant backed up by people such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates was already being tested in humans.
Less popular than Neuralink, the implant Synchron is FDA approved, possibly because it is less invasive — it does not require an open brain surgery or any skull drilling. The device can be implanted in two hours and recovery takes only 48 hours before the patient can be released.
Inserted through veins, this device is made of small sensors that interact with the motor cortex and, through an antenna inserted under the chest skin, it’s possible to collect raw brain data and send it to external devices. Such a mechanism allows people with reduced mobility to “mentally” interact with smart home appliances or even a smartphone or computer. One of the subjects in the study, Phillip O’Breen, was already able to use the Synchron implant to tweet on the platform now owned by Elon Musk.
From a less scholarly perspective, all of this makes me think of a dialogue between two characters in the game Overwatch. Both are scientists, but Mercy is seen as the good doctor and Moira is a more experimental, Frankenstein-ish scientist that has not many ethical concerns provided that her goals are achieved.
During a dialogue, Mercy says that she would rather wait a century to achieve scientific progress than causing all the damage that Moira caused with her experiments. In response, Moira says: “What a joy it must be to feel entitled to patience.”
Though these technologies were proposed in order to solve problems, how far are we good to go?
This is precisely the question made in this excellent philosophical short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1973), by Ursula K. Le Guin. In this fictional story, a city lives in perfect harmony but at the cost of children that are held captive. At a certain point in every citizens’ life they are obliged to visit these children and see how the system actually works. As outrageous as it can be, most people prefer to ignore and live their good lives despite someone else’s suffering.
With that in mind, how many of us would agree to visit such prisons and give up on our comforts and privileges that come after suffering? Judging by the way we still buy things from companies that rely on slavery and animal suffering, the discomfort caused by the knowledge of these experiments with spider corpses and neural implants becomes very relative and similar to what we discussed last week.
