At the mid-point of Alien: Earth‘s first episode, the show’s protagonist — an android uploaded with the consciousness of a dying child — shakily asks, “If I’m not human, what am I?” By the episode’s end, the “hybrid” known as Wendy (Sydney Chandler) confidently proclaims, “I am human.”
Noah Hawley’s new FX series owes much of its style to the original 1979 Alien film, but thanks to its fascinating hybrid storyline, much of its narrative drive is more similar to Alien’s divisive prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and the crowd-pleasing midquel, Alien: Romulus. With Wendy and her hybrid cohorts, Hawley gets to explore the malleable definition of “human” outside the constraints of a two-hour-long film.
On the show, Wendy is the new version of Marcy, an 11-year-old (played by Florence Bensberg) succumbing to a terminal illness. Prodigy Corp. CEO and trillionaire Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) convinces Marcy she can live forever by uploading her brain activity into the “body” of a powerful android. After the successful transition of Marcy into Wendy (and Marcy’s off-screen death), Prodigy secretly uploads several more terminal children into androids, who are all physically designed as young adults, but think, reason, and emote as the children they once were.
Wendy tells her new sibling hybrids that Prodigy needed young brains to create their new forms, as adult noggins wouldn’t fit inside the androids. It’s sci-fi science and narrative necessity that likely dictates this delineation between adults and children, but the attempt to turn neural activity into code isn’t far-fetched. Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk (who bears certain similarities to Kavalier), has been developing implantable brain-computer interfaces for nearly a decade, with the stated goal of helping people with disabilities regain mobility and independence via technology. Last year, Musk announced Neuralink implanted its first brain chip in a human.
“[The chip] enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking,” Musk tweeted at the time. “Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer.”
Neuralink’s chip implantation on a quadriplegic patient yielded some successful results, but didn’t go exactly as planned.
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Playing God?
David Ryan Polgar is the founder and president of the nonprofit All Tech Is Human, which works with Silicon Valley companies and organizations on thorny ethical issues. Polgar draws a clear line between what Neuralink is ostensibly pursuing and what Prodigy accomplishes.
“While there are well-known companies like Neuralink that work on brain-computer interfaces, the process of uploading human consciousness to a synthetic body is still highly speculative,” Polgar tells Mashable. “The vast technical hurdles and ethical dilemmas of uploading human consciousness haven’t fully dampened the predictions of futurists, which is why the concept plays out in Alien: Earth as hybrids.”
Prof. Carlos Gershenson-Garcia, an empire innovation professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton, says tech companies are many years from implanting our souls into robots or computer chips. (Alien: Earth is set nearly 100 years in the future, so they have time to catch up to the show.)
“The main problem is that we still don’t understand what consciousness is, nor how it functions in us and other species,” Gershenson-Garcia says. “We assume that our brains have to do something with it, but we don’t know which mechanisms are responsible for it. Is it at the neuronal level? Molecular level? Quantum level? We have no idea. So how could we aim to replicate it in robots?”
If companies like Neuralink do have ambitions to transfer human consciousness, would they collaborate with ethicists and thinkers like Polgar or Gershenson-Garcia, or do it furtively like the fictional Prodigy Corp.? Gershenson-Garcia hopes the former would be true, saying that, irregardless of whatever form they took, “building conscious machines creates moral responsibilities that we might not be ready for.”
For Polgar, he is full of questions that sound very similar to ones being raised on Alien: Earth.
“The larger questions that the prospect of uploading human consciousness presents are whether the result is a continuation of the individual’s life or a new, altered being, and whether striving to live forever is a worthy pursuit,” he says. “Living forever is the ultimate Faustian Bargain, a desire that should never really be pursued or accepted. Paradoxically, the very beauty of life is tied to its fragility. So while uploading consciousness to live forever is the dream of many, it would lead to a dystopian future for all of us.”
