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Paper short abstract

Using the case of tissue-based biohybrid robots, we identify three key features of these more-than-human entities - interrupted co-evolution, distributed yet minimal agency, and biocentric bias - and argue for a gradual, context-sensitive ethics.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, we draw attention to a new class of more-than-humans: Litbea, or life-in-the-border-entities (Gómez-Márquez, 2024) - borderline forms of life created, stabilised and interpreted at the intersection of the biological, the engineering and the computational. This category includes artificial cells and genomes, chimeras, xenobots, brain organoids, and biohybrid robots. Our analysis focuses on tissue-based biohybrid robotics, which we have studied over the past two years as part of the Biohybrid Futures project at the University of Southampton through expert interviews and participatory workshops with researchers and stakeholders.

We show why biohybrid robots matter for more-than-human studies, especially posthumanist biopolitics. Unlike more familiar nonhuman actors in STS, such as dogs, bacteria or fungi, tissue-based robots present a distinctive ontological and ethical challenge. We identify three key features. First, they have a partial or interrupted co-evolutionary status. Their living components have an evolutionary history, but in engineering experiments they are extracted from ordinary life cycles and placed in controlled laboratory environments. These robots do not reproduce or evolve autonomously; instead, they exist as temporary assemblages sustained through human intervention. Second, their agency is distributed yet minimal. Their behaviour emerges as an effect of the laboratory assemblage, while remaining tightly constrained by experimental design, short life spans, and the disposable character of most specimens. Third, interpretation of these entities remains strongly biocentric. Debates about their ontology and ethics repeatedly collapse into the question of life. We therefore argue for a gradual, context-sensitive ethics better suited to such unstable more-than-human entities.