Like it or not, cloning is here to stay. Bans and regulations will prove futile, but we don’t have to watch the take-off of such a controversial industry from the side lines.
More Accessible
Greedy suppliers taking advantage of desperate people, caring neither of the falseness of what they sell, nor of the suffering of their subjects. Weak, selfish and ignorant consumers supporting an unethical business… Animal rights groups paint a bleak picture of the pet cloning industry, and not entirely without reason.
Commercial cloning has been around since 2009, when RNL Bio, a South Korean firm, cloned two puppies from a beagle using stem cells from the dog’s fat tissue. Not long after that, RNL’s first international costumers – a couple in Florida – received a puppy from their dead pet at a cost of $155,000. Prices have fallen by two thirds by 2017, when a Michigan photographer, driven by desperation to connect to her daughter who committed suicide, became famous for having her daughter’s favorite dog cloned for $50,000. By SoCient’s estimates, over 1,000 pets are cloned globally every year, leading to the suffering of up to ten times as many donors and hosts.
Cloning is Not Copying
For paying such a high price – both economically and morally – customers must expect serious returns. Indeed, the cloning of pets is often performed either to undo their loss or to escape grief by preserving a connection to a dead relative through them. While these emotional needs are understandable, consumers have to recognize that they might not necessarily get what they paid for. Cloning is not copying; while it might be able to replicate the physical characteristics (hardware) of the lost one, it just cannot duplicate the mind and spirit (software). Thus, buyers of such imperfect ‘replicants’ may actually cause further suffering to themselves when they realize that the cute puppy that looks just like their late dog, does not love them the way they remembered and imagined.
Bans Are Doomed to Fail
Yet, while animal rights groups and philosophers are right to point out the controversies of the nascent cloning industry, our societies’ and governments’ response should not be a general ban or overly strict regulation. The search for eternal life is at least as deep an obsession for humanity as are the ways to forget about our constant failure in this regard. While alcohol, drugs and prostitution have never helped anyone actually forget about the certain death awaiting us, bas have completely failed to stop countless millions from trying. All that regulations have ever achieved were the extension of the criminal underworld and the corruption of law enforcement. A general ban on cloning would only lead to similar results, while not stopping anyone with enough money to get a dose of false hope.
Virtual Eternity: An Alternative?
Like it or not, cloning is here to stay. Bans and strict regulations will prove futile, but we don’t have to watch the take-off of such a controversial industry from the side lines. Physical cloning is not the only road to “virtual eternity”. Cloning the mind rather than the body could prove to be an ethically less questionable, and emotionally less risky escape rout for those unable or unwilling to deal with grief over the loss of loved ones, be those bi- or quadrupedal creatures. Through public information campaigns and smart tax schemes it would be possible to nudge the bulk of customers away from carbon copies and towards embracing silicone ones.
The Unhappy Human
While “ethically less questionable” may be quite self-evident (as it’s hard to not be less questionable than a practice that involves ten living beings suffer for creating an imperfect copy of one); “emotionally less risky” may seem to be a far-fetched statement for many. Those who have seen the episode “Be Right Back” of the TV show “Black Mirror” – where a woman gets heartbroken after purchasing a copy of her dead boyfriend based on his looks and online history but still not feeling like the person she used to love – might be especially skeptical. However, our perception of “things” are still very different from “beings”. Humans have been projecting personhood onto inanimate objects without disastrous consequences for hundreds of years, as Bruce Duncan of Terasem Movement, a foundation that aims to transfer human consciousness to computers, has pointed out. Though far from being easy, it will probably still prove much less harmful to be disappointed in a computer simulation than in a breathing, living creature.
As a Matter of Grief
Trusting either a “software” or “hardware” clone with easing our grief is still not without its risks, though. Fulfilling our desire to numb pain may very well hinder our ability to move on, even if said replicants are not more than blurry shadows of the lost original. These risks should not, however, be considered any different from those brought on by cars and airplanes. Grief has very serious economic costs. Solutions that can help vulnerable people get through the most critical time need to be evaluated rationally. Just as doing 200km/h on a bumpy country road is justly forbidden as causing undue risk to both the driver and the wider society, certain forms of cloning might have to be ruled out in the future, while keeping all the others legal.
As prices of both physical clones and mind-simulations are due to fall, making them more accessible, the time has come to start a social dialogue on what should be considered as acceptable risks and costs. A decade ago cloning your pet would have cost you over $150,000. In another decade, prices may go below $25,000 – just to stay competitive with new generations of androids impersonating our lost ones. At the very least, a broad social consensus must be reached before the first successful chatbot - based human simulation hits the market. Creating an Intelligent Avatar may cost as little as $25 a month – or could even be “free”, in the Facebook-sense of “free”, anyways.
[VOTE] Would you try to escape grief?
a) Give me that fake mind, and tell me every day that it's real!
b) If it looks like Charlie and smells like Charlie, it IS Charlie. Give me that clone. Now.
c) I'm ready for the pain. I wanna feel alive. Feel real.
Comments