Welcome to our fourth of five dispatches on Five Gold Things for 2024. For our penultimate bulletin, things are turning a little remarkable…
Synthetic frontiers
Next year we will be launching a large-scale public engagement experience to communicate the current landscape of synthetic embryos. In this, participants will be taken on a journey of decision-making to help them form a view of their creation and research. The project will build a picture of public perception to contribute to upcoming Parliamentary debates around regulation.
The timing is important. As of this year, you can take a stem cell from any human to create an embryo — first announced by the Weizmann Institute in September. It is now clear we can also use brain cells to create consistent 3D tissue cultures that model the brain, in miniature (referred to as brain organoids). Synthetic tissue is going to be the big frontier of the next decade and has now entered exponential growth stage.
Interestingly, a Google search of ‘organoids’ results largely in technical definitions from specialist publications — we don’t yet have a conceptual framework in which we can even begin to grasp this. There is also no legal basis — yet — for classifying organoids.
The big philosophical question is: what are synthetic organoids? There is some evidence they might be able to experience consciousness, or have receptors for pain and pleasure. As with our discussion about animism on day one of our bulletins, how do we begin to explore a potential new type of relationship with a new type of entity?
This decade, pop psychology has tuned into psychoanalytic relational therapy, whether via Philippa Perry’s Guardian column, Elizabeth Day and Emma Reed Turrell’s podcast Best Friend Therapy or Esther Perel’s Where Should We Begin game.
In 2024 we’ll be thinking about how the rise of relationship therapies can help us navigate how we relate to these automated and synthetic entities when we are still forming a view of what, and who, the other is.
Next, where we’ll be asking — Who makes the future?
