The Xenobots Have Arrived and Science-Fiction Writers Should Be Panicking
This month, an ecologist estimated that over one billion animals had been killed due to Australian bushfires in 2019 and 2020. Days after this prediction, researchers on the other side of the world unveiled a consequential new study into the construction of miniscule living robots, or molecular machines named “xenobots”. Humans, completely incapable of meaningful communication with any other species to ensure their survival, have now become the only entities in the known universe that can create new programmable life of our own design. With that in mind, how on Earth will our science-fiction writers possibly present us humans as the ‘good guys’ going forward?
Far from representative of imagined forms of alien life depicted in centuries of fictional work, we in fact know where xenobots come from and how to make them. They are constructed from skin and heart cells taken from the embryos of an African species of clawed frog, Xenopus laevis. The living robots were programmed with an evolutionary algorithm inspired by natural selection, and so their organic structure and programmable design presents particularly tough ethical dilemmas — should we treat these and future iterations of these molecular machines as organisms, algorithms, or both? Is life in fact data processing in general, and can algorithms define the actions of all organisms? I consider it fitting for science-fiction writers to be among the first to panic upon learning about the arrival of the xenobots, because they will need to be among the most effective popularisers of a society’s opinions around ethical dilemmas such as these. To ensure a beneficial future they will also need to be responsible scientific thinkers.
Macro-historian and author Yuval Noah Harari dedicated an entire chapter to the importance of the science-fiction genre in his 2018 publication ’21 Lessons for the 21st Century’. According to him, “Humans control the world because they can cooperate better than any other animal, and they can cooperate so well because they believe in fictions. Poets, painters and playwrights are therefore at least as important as soldiers and engineers.” Now that we suddenly have the power (in this case, an internet link leading to open-source research) to create our own novel programmable life forms, it becomes clear that our patterns of consuming scientific facts through fictional narratives need to change. For example, what do contemporary allegories of female robots outsmarting male scientists teach us about the ethical dilemmas that computer scientists are struggling to pose to society in 2020? These types of straightforward metaphors discuss gender inequality and male fears of female influence, not the societal implications of an increasingly automated world. While a story like this may be entertaining, it is lazy science-fiction that gets away with scraping bottom-of-the-barrel emotions from an audience.
Modern science-fiction writers’ often lackadaisical attitudes towards scientific accuracy and accountability could simply mean that, as a species, we have become far better scientists than what our stagnant philosophies can keep up with. As Nick Bostrom speculates in his 2014 publication ‘Superintelligence’, this philosophical bankruptcy could be attributed to “the unsuitability of the human cortex for philosophical work.” Bostrom continues in speculating, “On this view, our most celebrated philosophers are like dogs walking on their hind legs — just barely attaining the threshold level of performance required for engaging in the activity at all.” Does this mean that we should halt scientific progress until we become wise enough to adapt our philosophies at the pace of our ever-changing scientific thought? No. It is impossible to halt this scientific progress, and it is unclear that rapid philosophical change is at all beneficial for humans, the billions of animals that die due to human error, or the xenobots in a petri dish that we are now responsible for programming.
For now, it seems reasonable to urge science-fiction writers to pose more pressing ethical and philosophical dilemmas than ones that are, as of this decade, rather unscientific. Before any little green Martian men grace our screens once more, perhaps we need to allow the xenobots their time in the spotlight of human culture.
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