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Issue 4.11 | Nov 1996

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Ribopunk (continued)

So what happens to the concept of the human species at that point? Or even of species?

The genetic alphabet doesn't have any particular meaning until you put together certain combinations of letters. When you assemble the components of the genetic alphabet in one fashion, it's a full human; when you put them together another way, you end up with a half-dog, half-human. It becomes a big soup of genes.

Are normal people going to be able to handle that?

We've been talking about these sorts of questions with artificial intelligence for a while. But the biologi-cal revolution is at once more alluring and more off-putting than the cybernetic revolution. Everybody can relate to familiar animals - dogs, cats, whatever. By grafting intelligence or even human features on them, you engender a whole host of emotional responses you don't get with robots. Especially if they think and talk, they're in a twilight zone where you don't know what your response should be: Are they humans? Subhumans?

Dumb animals are very alluring, but when they approach our own emotional and intellectual capacity, they will become very disturbing.

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by Bruce Sterling

Wired 40


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