In its 2019 report on Regulation for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the UK government describes a future characterised by a fusion of technologies and a blurring of the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds. Prof Brigitte Nerlich, offers her thoughts on responsibility in a bio hybrid world where fact meets fiction.

Do you remember the film that I call in my mind ‘number five is alive’ or to give it its real name “Short Circuit”?

It came out in 1986 and features an experimental robot that is struck by lightning, gains intelligence, escapes a military facility, and goes out to learn about the world. The abiding image for me is of Johnny 5, the human-like robot with its big eyes and metal flapping eye brow muttering ‘more input’. A rather benign and charming image.

Jump to 2024, when I saw an advert featuring security cameras, looking a bit like the head of Johnny 5, turning into a swarm of wing-flapping flying drones. Unlike the loveable Johnny 5 the flying surveillance bots are very creepy.

A few days afterwards, Philip Ball (author of, amongst other books, How to Grow a Human) alerted me to a paper by Rafael Mestre, Anibal M. Astobiza and colleagues about ‘bio-hybrid robots’ and responsible innovation that has just come out in PNAS. I began to read the article and, to my horror, I came across an as yet speculative “unique breed of biohybrid drones incorporating muscle tissues from a certain bird species renowned for their exceptional flight endurance”. Hmmm, I wondered, what are bio-hybrid robots? I had heard about biobots but bio-hybrid robots?

Bio-hybrid robots

Bio-hybrid robots integrate living tissues or cells with mechanical or electronic parts to create hybrid systems that can potentially combine the advantages of both biological and artificial elements. Bio-hybrid robots are also called soft robots or living robots, living machines, or synthetic robots.

Bio-hybrid robots are ‘related’ to nanobots, microbots, anthrobots, neurobots, xenobots, organoids, brains on a chip, organoid robots and more, All of these various relations are sometimes called ‘biobots‘. However, ‘real’ bio-hybrid robots have only emerged over the last ten years, it seems:

“In 2014, research teams led by mechanical science and engineering professor Taher Saif [a co-author on the paper I am discussing below] and bioengineering professor Rashid Bashir at the University of Illinois worked together to developed the first self-propelled biohybrid swimming and walking biobots powered by beating cardiac muscle cells derived from rats.” (See press release)

A decade later we are now at a point when bio-hybrid robots deserve proper ethical attention, especially in the context of ‘responsible innovation‘. This is the focus of the new paper which has come out as part of an ESRC New Investigator award “Biohybrid Futures: A framework for research governance and application of bio-hybrid robotics”. In this project Dr Rafael Mestre and others study responsible research and innovation of this emerging technology.

Bio-hybrids and ethical dilemmas

As the press release points out, the “paper’s authors identified three areas where bio-hybrid robotics present unique ethical issues: Interactivity – how bio-robots interact with humans and the environment, Integrability – how and whether humans might assimilate bio-robots (such as bio-robotic organs or limbs), and Moral status.”

How to explore such ethical issues?:

“In a series of thought experiments, they describe how a bio-robot for cleaning our oceans could disrupt the food chain, how a bio-hybrid robotic arm might exacerbate inequalities, and how increasing sophisticated bio-hybrid assistants could raise questions about sentience and moral value.”

And: “The living tissue used in their fabrication, potential for sentience, distinct environmental impact, unusual moral status, and capacity for biological evolution or adaptation create unique ethical dilemmas that extend beyond those of wholly artificial or biological technologies.”

To deal with such hybrid ethical dilemmas the article introduces readers to four schools of thoughts. They are: virtue ethics (think Aristotle), deontologism (think Kant), consequentialism (think Bentham), and ethics of responsibility. I can’t provide a detailed overview of all these ethical frameworks (which are well described in the article), but I just wanted to focus briefly on the last and perhaps least well-known one, the ethics of responsibility established by the German environmental philosopher Hans Jonas. Given the state of the environment, his philosophy focuses on the interests and needs of future generations.

These frameworks “provide varied yet valuable lenses through which we can examine the ethics of biohybrid robotics.” (PNAS article) The authors apply them to their case studies and arrive at detailed critical questions for each case which allows them to make recommendations for labs, institutions and policy makers.

Some of the conclusions they draw are however not overly startling. For example, they call “for stakeholder participation in nurturing a culture of philosophical reflexivity, rather than increasing inefficient research bureaucracy that would stifle positive innovation.”

Where next?

This is a great starting point for a thorough ethical debate about bio-hybrid robots focusing on responsible innovation. However, the topic is, as I found out while trying to write this post, extremely complex and there is more to do… as always.

There are so many types of bio-hybrid robots and there are so many situations in which they can emerge or be deployed. Can the ethical framework proposed in the article cope with all this variation? For example, a ‘Xenobot’ is perhaps only a metaphorical machine, while a flapping drone is part machine part living tissue; some bio-hybrid robots are the size of a cell or smaller, some the size of a human or bigger, and so on – what does that mean for ethical considerations?

There is also what one might call the issue of ethical learning. Ethics is a vast field with many proponents, from Aristotle to Hans Jonas and beyond. But then there are all the ‘ethics’ that have emerged alongside emerging technologies, such as bioethics, medical ethics, nanoethics, neuroethics and now machine ethics. What do they all contribute to our understanding and handling of bio-hybrid robots?

The final thing to consider is that all the different bio-hybrid robots come with different but over-lapping socio-cultural narratives attached to them which will probably shape public understanding, perception and possibly acceptance – think Johnny 5 vs flying security cameras. Think also Blade Runner (1982, 2017), Surviving Mars (2018) and more.

When fact and fiction meet

Here I only want to provide one hint at a media representation of a bio-hybrid robot from 2016. That was the time when the “World’s first artificial animal: a biohybrid robo-ray” or, more soberly perhaps, a “melding of tissue and technology” was announced. One article in the New Indian Express was entitled “Robotics crossing the frontier of fantasy: Artificial Intelligence escapes from movie halls to vroom mankind into a brave new world”. It says:

“An efficient mix of man and machine, however, is not just a geek’s dream. Some robots stay as a mere doodle on a paper napkin for over a year. Until Harvard professor Kevin Kit Parker, who may be the Frankenstein of the 21st century, went to work and created the world’s first biohybrid robot, the Roboray – a ‘living robot’ whose gold skeleton is encased in a thin rubbery body and is powered by heart cells of rats. This may be the first step on how to build a human heart.”

Frankenstein and Brave New World … 

A lot has happened in science and in public between 1986 and now, between the friendly knowledge-thirsty robot and the creepy bio-hybrid robot swarms, but public imagery stays the same, it seems. It would be great to find out more about that. We can only innovate responsibly if we understand the language and culture in which that innovation happens

  • Brigitte Nerlich is Emeritus Professor of Science, Language and Society at the Institute for Science and Society, School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham. Between 2012 and 2016 she was Director of the Leverhulme research programme ‘Making Science Public‘. She continues to write blog posts on the blog associated with this programme of research, mainly on genetics and genomics, climate change, infectious disease and the use of metaphor in public debates about these issues.
  • This article is reproduced with permission.