Dire wolves are back — not the pack that prowled the halls of Winterfell but the real things, in flesh and blood. When George R R Martin chose the sigil of House Stark in the Game of Thrones, he took a cue from the Pleistocene era. The dire wolves that feature in the blockbuster fantasy series are named after a species of large canines that were endemic to the Americas during the last ice age.
These prehistoric carnivores dwindled and then died out many millennia ago, but a team of scientists is now rewriting their script. This April, Colossal Biosciences — which describes itself as “The de-extinction company” on X — announced the birth of Romulus and Remus, two dire wolf pups resurrected from the dead. The duo, and their younger sister, Khaleesi, are the first dire wolves to roam this planet in over 10,000 years.
The complex genetic editing that made this feat possible has triggered howls of celebration in many quarters. But there have also been a few growls of consternation. Story continues below this ad Some experts have questioned the fidelity of the tall claims made by Colossal.
Tweaking a minuscule number of genetic codes may have granted them the appearance of dire wolves, but to the critics, the trio are just grey wolves with cosmetic upgrades. Less technical are the questions that have been raised about the ethics of this enterprise. Is “de-extinction” really a noble pursuit, or is it the “allure of playing God” that drives experiments of this nature?
Some of you may be old enough to remember this question being posed in a movie that made the Tyrannosaurus Rex a household name. Their social media posts suggest that folks at Colossal have watched Jurassic Park. Perhaps they forgot how the movie ends — or, simply chose to ignore its grim portents.
The latter is not hard to imagine. There is, after all, a rich tradition of scientists ignoring the warnings of science-fiction — a phenomenon that has become a leitmotif for the Netflix show, Black Mirror. One of the reasons for the enduring popularity of Black Mirror is how the fictional technology it features feels eerily close to reality.
In its stories, the future — often dark and dystopian — is not the distant epoch of a Star Trek but a present that is almost upon us. Story continues below this ad An early episode of the series (‘Nosedive’) was set in a world where every social interaction is followed by a rating. These ratings determine the course of a person’s life and career, and one minor faux pas can set the dominoes tumbling.
Soon after the episode’s release, parallels were drawn with the “social credit system” in China. The idea expands the well-worn concept of financial creditworthiness to incorporate the more ephemeral notion of “social creditworthiness”, by “judging citizens’ behaviour”. Granted, the system is fragmented and often misunderstood, and your neighbours in China cannot (yet) rate you poorly after a quarrel.
But a low score can “disqualify” people from buying plane tickets or boarding trains, a scenario that would fit right into a Black Mirror fable. “Nosedive” is not the only instance when the series has echoed into the real world. In a 2013 episode (Be Right Back), a woman avails of a service that allows her to communicate with her dead boyfriend.
This premise has now been realised by a host of “grief-tech” companies. For the right price, these businesses offer you solace by generating AI-powered simulations of the loved ones you’ve lost. In the episode “Metalhead”, the autonomous hounds that roam a dystopian wasteland are just the bulkier (and more belligerent) cousins of the Unitree B2-W, a real-life robot dog that can outrun an average marathoner.
And the ability to record and replay one’s memories (The Entire History of You) is not that hard to imagine in a world where we are surrounded by tools that chronicle our conversations. None of this is to say we must become Luddites. Innovations in technology have made our lives immeasurably better.
Over a decade ago, when I bought my first car, I was delighted to see volume buttons on the steering. I marvelled, then, at the wonders of science that allowed me to change radio channels without taking my hands off the wheel. Now my car can tell me the temperature in Timbuktu and remind me to take my multivitamins.
This is the shape of humanity’s progress, and it is, on the whole, a good thing. Yet, there are occasions when you wonder if we should pause and take a moment to reflect on the implications of our actions. When you discover that ChatGPT consumes 1.174 billion gallons of water each month — enough to fill 1,780 Olympic-size swimming pools — you question if your cutesy (and uncredited) Studio Ghibli-style avatar was worth it.
These considerations are incumbent not just upon the users of new technology, of course, but also its creators. Whether it’s the de-extinction of dire wolves or the building of robotic canids, perhaps it is worth prefacing the project with a query that was once raised by Ian Malcom. At the lunch table in Jurassic Park, while discussing the propriety of creating a dinosaur-filled amusement park, Malcom had chided the CEO, John Hammond, saying, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to ask if they should.” More than 30 years have passed, but this has never been as pertinent as it is today.
The writer is a Mumbai-based lawyer
