You’ve seen instances of quadruple amputees, people losing their lower half and instestines, etc. After playing a bit of Deus Ex I started wondering exactly how much of a person needs to exist for them to survive (not talking quality of life, but just enough to communicate intelligently). How far could you do it with only natural parts and then how far could you go with artificial parts too?
Yea, we can probably keep a head alive by itself for a short period, I suspect as you pointed out that the “immediate risk of dying from a complication” means if we attempted it the first person wouldn’t even last weeks or months.
The ethics of doing so on the other hand are stupidly complicated, which deters almost all effort in the development of this kind of system. You couldn’t ethically do it to anything smarter than a pig without huge problems, and you may even have trouble with that.
I’m honestly surprised we haven’t seen any hint of this coming out from some random billionaire funding a bunch of doctors to work on it behind the scenes. I’m sure there are doctors who for the right price would be willing to move to some country with less-stringent regulations and attempt some tests on chimps.
Give it a few months. Those assholes have a whole island state off the coast of Honduras so that they can skirt development regulation. Peter fucking Theil. It’s only a matter of time before Elon grabs his neuralink and joins the psychopath “accomplishment is the only reason to live” circle jerk for the transhumanist bullshit.