On: Researchers are building computers that run on brain organoids - but have...

I read today of scientists building computers from brain tissue grown in a dish. They call them “organoids.” They speak of processing power and efficiency, of a new frontier. I think of the cannery floor, of the bodies that were merely parts of the machine, their own thoughts irrelevant to the work their hands performed.

The ethical issue they say they’ve neglected? It is not some abstract question of consciousness. It is a question of the mill. It is the view from the floor of the petri dish. What is this tissue? It was given, they say, by donors for biomedical research. A noble cause. But who was the donor? Some clerk, some labourer, some mother paying a hospital bill? Did they understand they were providing not just cells, but the very architecture of thought, to be wired into a new kind of engine? The system has always found a way to process surplus. First it was our hours, then our data. Now it seeks to process the very template of our minds.

They will call it a donation. From the boardroom, it is a resource transaction. From the floor - from the position of that cluster of neurons firing in a vat - what is it? Is it work? Is it being? The sensation, if it could be reported, would not be of computation, but of a specific, endless task with no shift’s end, no wage, no sky. They have designed a system where the ultimate piece of the means of production is a fragment of a human being. They are not building a computer. They are building the final factory. The worker, this time, is grown to spec and never clocks out.

The body’s knowledge is everything. But what knowledge does a brain have when its only experience is the electric pulse of a task it did not choose? This is not progress. It is the oldest story, written in the newest, smallest, most terrible ink.