To Automate Is Human - Aeon - Pocket

In the 1920s, the Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov used artificial insemination to breed a'humanzee' – a cross between a human and our closest relative species, the chimpanzee. Given the moral quandaries a humanzee might create, we can be thankful that Ivanov failed: when the winds of Soviet scientific preferences changed, he was arrested and exiled. But Ivanov's endeavour points to the persistent, post-Darwinian fear and fascination with the question of whether humans are a creature apart, above all other life, or whether we're just one more animal in a mad scientist's menagerie. Humans have searched and repeatedly failed to rescue ourselves from this disquieting commonality. Numerous dividers between humans and beasts have been proposed: thought and language, tools and rules, culture, imitation, empathy, morality, hate, even a grasp of'folk' physics. But they've all failed, in one way or another. I'd like to put forward a new contender – strangely, the very same tendency that elicits the most dread and excitement among political and economic commentators today.