Imagine a tiny fly-like drone with delicate translucent wings and multi-lensed eyes, scouting out enemies who won't even notice it's there. Or a substantial cockroach-like robot, off on a little trip to check out a nuclear accident, wearing a cute little backpack, fearless, regardless of what the Geiger counter says. These little engineered creatures might engage in search and rescue — surveillance, environmental or otherwise — inspecting dangerous areas you would not want to send a human being into, like a tunnel or building that could collapse at any moment, or a facility where there's been a gas leak.
These robots are blazing new ethical terrain. That's because they are not animals performing tasks for humans, nor are they robots that draw inspiration from nature. The drone that looks like a fly is both machine and bug. The Madagascar hissing cockroach robot doesn't just perfectly mimic the attributes that allow cockroaches to withstand radiation and poisonous air: it is a real life animal, and it is also a mechanical creature controlled remotely. These are tiny cyborgs, though even tinier ones exist, involving microbes like bacteria or even a type of white blood cell. Like fictional police officer Alex Murphy who is remade into RoboCop, these real-life cyborgs act via algorithms rather than free will.
Even as the technology for the creation of biohybrids, of which cyborgs are just the most ethically fraught category, has advanced in leaps and bounds, separate research on animal consciousness has been revealing the basis for considering insects just as we might other animals. (If you look at a tree of life, you will see that insects are indeed animals and therefore share part of our evolutionary history: even our nervous systems are not completely alien to theirs). Do we have the right to turn insects into cyborgs that we can control to do our bidding, including our military bidding, if they feel pain or have preferences or anxieties?
Making a cyborg animals can mean modifying animals with mechanical parts or otherwise enhancing them, or it can mean using the "entire animal body as a scaffold to manipulate robotically," as one 2022 paper put it. There are endless possibilities to how a cyborg might work, what it could do, and how it could be powered and controlled, resulting in a tremendously creative discipline. Here are just a few examples: The energy to power a cyborg cockroach and control its behavior, regardless of what it would prefer to be doing, can be generated from the creature's own living body through enzymatic biofuel cells worn as a tiny backpack. It can even be rechargeable.
Or scientists can use the insect's own "blood," a liquid called hemolymph: biofuel cells implanted on the organism can consume the sugars in its very own hemolymph to generate electricity to power the cyborg. The algorithms used to make a cyborg cockroach navigate complex environments, such as obstacle-ridden sand or rock-strewn surfaces, might be derived from the insect's own natural behaviors, exploited to achieve human ends.
Likewise, the boundaries that keep an insect — a hawkmoth or cockroach, in one such project — under human control can be invisibly and automatically generated from the very backpack it wears, with researchers nudging it with neurostimulation pulses to guide it back within the boundaries of its invisible fence if it tries to stray away.
As a society, you can't really say we've spent significant time considering the ethics of taking a living creature and using it literally as a machine, although reporter Ariel Yu, reviewing some of the factors to take into account in a 2024 story inspired by the backpack-wearing roaches, framed the ethical dilemma not in terms of the use of an animal as a machine — you could say using an ox to pull a cart is doing that — but specifically the fact that we're now able to take direct control of an animal's nervous system. Though as a society we haven't really talked this through either, within the field of bioengineering, researchers are giving it some attention.
Still, neither the philosophical framework nor animal welfare protections and regulations and laws have caught up to what we are learning about animal consciousness and sensation. Last year, a group of scientists argued that there is a risk that this collective inertia will lead to unexpected negative consequences as the technology advances while a complementary field of biohybrid robotics ethics does not.
"While this new era of living robots presents unprecedented opportunities for positive societal impact, it also poses a host of ethical challenges," they wrote, arguing that the evolving or nascent field of biohybrid robotics demands new governance frameworks.
Of course, the history of animals being used for human ends is biblically old. Prehistorically old, even. We use animals for industrial, medical, military and endless other purposes beyond their use for food, clothing and companionship. As humans, we set the agenda — even when you would imagine it's an agenda that peaceful porpoises turned into Cold War surveillance devices, or the rats risking their lives to disarm landmines, might not endorse if they were given a say. But literally turning an animal into a cyborg that we control not with (or not only with) the usual coercion, pain and rewards, but with a remote is a new level of co-optation of the natural world and animal autonomy for human ends.
There's also what Nicole Xu, a bioengineer and research scientist who runs the Xu lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, calls the "yuck factor" — the reflexive sense of revulsion many of us feel at the mere idea of an animal, even an insect, modified with mechanical parts and stripped of free will. In RoboCop, our yuck factor is carefully held at bay by the cyborg's tough, robotic exterior, but when Peter Weller, playing Adam Murphy/RoboCop, removes his helmet and we, and his partner Anne Lewis, truly see how his human body has been forcibly meshed with mechanical parts, it's not for nothing that he tells her "you may not like what you see."
But Xu argues that the yuck factor is not a sound basis for deducing what's ethical and what's not.
Existing protections for the use of research animals by and large prevent the creation of vertebrate cyborgs of this kind. (The definition of cyborg might include a human with prosthetics, though obviously that's not what we're talking about here.) So the question of cyborg ethics is currently a question of the ethics of creating cyborgs from invertebrate animals. Insects are invertebrates, as are jellyfish and other marine animals like sea sponges and corals that have also been researched for their cyborg potential.
Xu is working on the development of moon jellyfish cyborgs that might eventually be used to explore the mysterious environment at the bottom of the deepest oceans, using their natural water filtering capacity to collect water samples, and perhaps incorporating pH sensors, temperature sensors, and cameras. Unlike fish, jellyfish don't have swim bladders to control depth; instead, their tissue naturally adjusts to the surrounding water, allowing them to safely reach any given depth. And moon jellyfish are found in a variety of environments at different temperatures, salt levels, and depths, with other species found as deep as the Mariana Trench, suggesting that this work may be applicable more broadly to other species of jellyfish and to other marine invertebrates.
"There's a variety of different opportunities for using these cyborg jellyfish in the real world, but the bottleneck that I see right now is we can't really control them, so we've got to improve that first," Xu said. With graduate student Charles Fraga, she's busy testing different possible mechanisms to make the cyborg turn.
Insect consciousness
Invertebrates make up the vast majority of animals, around 97% of all animal species. This is convenient, since while there are strict and extensive regulations around the use of vertebrates in scientific research, it's generally been considered ethical to do experiments on invertebrates with little regulation or oversight. This is based on the assumption that creatures without backbones are fundamentally different from us, unable to experience either pain or suffering, to communicate in a meaningful way or to even experience conscious awareness.
And yet research is increasingly challenging this assumption. Matabele ants engage in wound care of injured ant comrades. Octopuses are intelligent and even playful, and while they don't have all the same neurotransmitters as humans, we do share some of the brain chemicals that produce different emotions, as well as equivalents with similar functional roles. Bad experiences lead honeybees to develop pessimistic biases, just like humans do. Prozac can soothe anxiety in shore crabs and humans alike.
In 2022, the U.K. became the first country to formally incorporate the idea of sentience into animal welfare law through a bill to create an Animal Sentience Committee that would review government policies, although the concept plays an implicit role in other animal welfare legislation. The U.K. legislation called for increased protections for two groups of invertebrates that, accumulating research suggests, share consciousness with us in meaningful, if very different, ways. These are cephalopod mollusks, a group that includes squids and octopuses, and decapod crustaceans, a group that includes lobsters and crabs. In fact, the legislation also explicitly allows the possibility of amendments that could bring any invertebrate under the protection of the act by including them in its definition of an "animal."
That's already a fairly radical step, not because the evidence doesn't support this — it does — but because it's such an outlier (the E.U. and Australia do protect some invertebrates in animal research.) In the United States, the question of what you can do to an animal in a laboratory or experimental environment would mostly fall under the aegis of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees established by academic institutions, each setting its own rules. Among invertebrates, only cephalopods like octopuses fall under IACUC guidelines at all, and even for them, we're talking about recommendations, not regulations requiring certain standards of care.
Xu is lead author on a paper published last month that uses the jellyfish as a case study to explore ethical considerations that have been or should be applied to the creation of such machine-invertebrate hybrids, and she makes recommendations for future guidelines she and her colleagues believe should be developed. Xu told Salon that there are no applications of research with jellyfish she can think of that she'd see as unethical. Nevertheless, she argues for ongoing research into nociception in invertebrates and continual adaptation of guidelines in response to what we learn. And despite the lack of protection from IACUC or other entities, Xu believes researchers have an ethical responsibility towards their subjects, whether they are endowed with backbones and central nervous systems or not. This means it's important to minimize harm, and to take a precautionary approach, doing our best to avoid things that might cause harm even we don't have enough evidence to be sure.
"We know that the species of jellyfish [in question] don't have pain receptors, they don't have nociceptors, which are like noxious stimuli receptors, and so they don't have a centralized nervous system either," Xu said. "So, you know, we feel very confident that they're not experiencing a lot of this noxious stimuli that we might think of as pain. But even so, we want to make sure that we're allowing the animals to rest in between experiments."
When it comes to insect cyborgs, though, Kristin Andrews, York Research Chair in Animal Minds and Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto, thinks the research is already clear enough to go further.
"So I think we are pretty safe at this point in time of the science to assume that all of these insects do feel something and so when we see them being used in these sorts of contexts for search-and-rescue or what-have-you, the question that arises for me has to do with the importance of agency and how the animals' agencies are being undermined by turning them into cyborgs that are then controlled by humans," Andrews told Salon in a video interview. She points to Drosophila, the fruit flies beloved of university research labs, which have been shown to exhibit a form of cultural learning, with females selecting mates of the same color as the males they've observed other females choosing, for example — a type of conformity motivation also seen, and considered significant, in monkeys.
Andrews was a coauthor of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, a declaration signed last April by a long list of animal consciousness, philosophy, neuroscience and cognitive science luminaries at New York University. The declaration says, in its second and third points:
"The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects)", and "when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks."
Although she hasn't seen any changes in terms of actual legislation or policy yet, Andrews says that people are beginning to argue that insects should be taken under consideration in animal welfare law. It's not that, by acknowledging that an insect can be an agent — meaning that it has agency — we can't use insects in any way ever again, though. Andrews acknowledged that even human agency is constrained by cultural and moral norms and the factors.
"The amount of agency one has always comes in degrees," she said. "But we think that there's a certain amount of agency that we need to be providing to agents, and that is to allow them to make their own kinds of choices within these constrained environments. So even when we're taking a lot of agency away from animals, in the case of farmed animals, laboratory animals or pet animals — and all these cases, we're limiting the things that they can do — but when there's positive welfare in those situations, it's because animals can make choices. What these cyborg insect cases are doing, it looks like to me, is removing all agency from the animal."
Andrews doesn't argue that it would never be possible ethically create cyborg insects, but that the trade-offs in terms of the value cyborgs might provide in terms of human health or environmental benefits for example, need to be carefully considered. So does positive welfare for animals in researchers' care, which should include offering choices and enrichment in laboratory environments, something Andrews says has also been found to result in better validated science using these animals.
"If you want to do it to insects and not to humans, you need to find a morally relevant difference, and species membership isn't a morally relevant difference that's interesting," Andrews said.
Xu, meanwhile, says that decision-making or desire, hallmarks of autonomy, are not something her invertebrate subjects experience. "I think it's more sensory feedback and biological drive than anything else," with researchers' control over their actions being rather like the muscle or nerve stimulation you might get in physical therapy, she said. That doesn't mean there are no welfare considerations for them.
"If the animals are in a stressful environment," Xu said of her jellyfish, "and they don't feel like... they're living in an environment that is conducive to reproduction, then they won't reproduce." Her team pays attention to other stress markers, such as that they secrete mucus when biologically stressed. "And we didn't see excess mucus secretions ... so we also just immediately knew that we weren't stressing out the animals."
Xu further notes that we have ethical responsibilities not only to individual animals, but to species as well: minimizing harm by using as few individuals as possible, or by using more individuals for shorter, less stressful periods of time, is one aspect of that, as is doing everything possible to minimize ocean pollution from electronic parts.
In a wider philosophical sense, there's something morally dubious about us viewing all organisms (from extremophiles to dogs) merely as vehicles for the enactment of human will and attainment of human goals. But, on a practical level, if we are to turn living creatures into little flying RoboCops, even as we destroy their habitats, should be allowed only when there is no alternative from the human perspective, in the sense that the good that can be achieved in environmental or human health terms really can't be adequately achieved in other ways: a decision that will never have an absolute answer, but will need to be hashed out as we go.
That's why we all need to be more aware of how the technology is advancing, and what it's being used for. And then, as Xu has described, we owe what we might call a debt of care: animal welfare in the laboratory, applied to insects as to other animals, is one way we can attempt a responsible balance between human needs and respect for the autonomy and intrinsic rights of the life that surrounds us. Taking far more significant steps to protect the habitats of these creatures would be another way to pay the debt we owe them.
And finally, animal-inspired engineering continues to advance, with animal bodies and capabilities inspiring both biohybrids like cyborgs, and forms of biomimicry or biohybridism that don't require stripping animals of their autonomy. As soon as we have the ability to replace living creatures with actual robots inspired by those creatures, we have a responsibility to do so.
