Human dignity and the moral status of bio-cybernetic cerebral organoids in Synthetic Biological Intelligences

Recent developments in the research field of artificial intelligence (AI) based on neural networks provide challenging questions regarding the ethical principles that should be applied in this complex domain. Kagan et al.’s published study highlights the fact that their synthetic biological intelligence (SBI) called ”DishBrain”, made of neurons from embryonic mice or human pluripotent stem cells grown on electronic chips connected to a computer, is capable of learning to play the arcade game Pong and shows signs of sentience. Based on this study, we tried to address some ethical questions regarding the bio-cybernetic cerebral organoids in SBI’s. Firstly, we approach the ethical aspects of human-animal chimeras in SBI’s based on the concept of human dignity and if it can or cannot be attributed to those hybrid systems. Secondly, we focus on if we can and what type of moral status should we attribute to SBI’s starting from different conceptualizations of human and animal moral status to different model-based arguments considering the capacity of sentience and the presence of human cells in this type of construct. We highlight how many arguments are in favor of starting an ethical debate on the emergent technology of bio-cybernetic cerebral organoids to obtain a consensus on how these organoids will exist and will be accepted in society.