Cyborg Slugs and Synthetic Stingrays

I don't think they're all electric. I think some are hybrids. That was a terrible joke. All right, Well, let's actually 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

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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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, 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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?

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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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? 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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.

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