The offloading ape: the human is the beast that automates – Antone Martinho-Truswell Aeon Essays

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. We lost our exclusive position in the animal kingdom, not because we overestimated ourselves, but because we underestimated our cousins.