The modern Frankensteins: On neurotech, AI, and not repeating the past

By Anjiolina Nakaya  

I am writing this on the anniversary of Mary Shelley’s birth. She was a Romantic writer whose famous work, Frankenstein, continues to provoke essential ethical debates about science. Recently, a book club in my hometown of Iloilo City invited me to review Frankenstein, an event I was deeply saddened to miss. I had been looking forward to engaging with that community, but my schedule was occupied with meetings on international collaborations regarding the ethics of neurotechnology.

Instead, my return to Iloilo was for a different purpose: the commemoration held on Aug. 22 for the Japanese war dead, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. I was called back not for the arts community, but to join the Nikkeijin (Japanese descendants) community from the prewar and war eras, and to honor my own Japanese ancestors.

The event was a poignant mix of solemnity and warmth. I met old friends of my late grandparents and members of the former Panay Nikkeijin Association, which my grandfather’s sister had once led. As my entire immediate family now resides in Japan, I was the sole representative of the Nakaya family present. The attendance of figures like City Mayor Treñas and former Senate President Drilon was significant, but the most important guest was Japanese Sen. Ayaka Shiomura, a descendant of Hiroshima bombing victims. She met with Nikkeijin descendants, particularly second-generation individuals, and two centenarian guerrilla war veterans.

One of them, Miyasato, is reportedly the last full Japanese descendant in Panay. She appeared aged, frail, and impoverished—an orphan who was compassionately adopted by Filipinos. Witnessing these interactions was heartwarming and served as a powerful reminder of our shared humanity and collective desire for peace eight decades later. However, it also forced me to confront the horrors of war and the role scientists played in creating the atomic bomb.

This resonated with stories my mother told me while I was growing up about our own distant relatives who were victims of the bomb, which is why she refused to watch the film Oppenheimer with me. The details were always vague, but we knew my great-grandfather had worked as an interpreter during the war. In an extraordinary decision, he chose to return to the Philippines afterward, refusing to abandon his children to orphanhood. This choice spared my family the profound misery that many other descendants faced. I learned more shocking details from Dr. Ohno, a Southeast Asian Studies researcher, on the bus after the event and from a historian, Dr. Jose, who told me that Panay Island saw some of the most brutal anti-guerrilla warfare of the occupation, which led to the tragic mass suicide of prewar Japanese civilians in Iloilo, who chose death over humiliating their soldiers by being a burden.

This revelation of my own hidden family history highlighted how distant I had been from it, largely because my Japanese mother has lived in Japan for decades. On that bus ride, my mind kept returning to the atomic bomb—developed by scientists in the Manhattan Project—and the famous meme that states, “The humanities teach us that just because we can build a bomb doesn’t mean we should.” I reflected on the complex reconnection of Nikkeijin with a heritage fractured by war, and my parents’ struggle to build a life in Japan. I once wished my mom were fully Filipino so our family could simply live together in the Philippines without ties to another nation.

These were sad childhood thoughts, mitigated by technology. My Filipino father bought my sisters and me a PC in the early 2000s to video call our Japanese mom on Yahoo Messenger. Later, we connected on Facebook, the essential platform for Filipino families abroad. As a Gen Z digital native, my childhood was spent in front of screens; I witnessed our TV upgrade to a flat panel and have a distinct memory of watching the 9/11 incident on the old set. I had advanced flip phones from Japan in elementary school, and this tech-savviness eventually led me to major in computer science.

But before that, in high school, I was an activist and a humanist. I would cut classes in my Atenean uniform to attend protests with DAKILA, a human rights organization I joined at 16. My grades suffered, and I eventually left the STEM program to transfer to a school for the HUMSS track, aligning my education with my activism and interest in the arts. My cohort was the first batch of the K-12 system and we came of age during Duterte’s six-year term, which was marked by scorn for Iloilo City. During this time, I founded an organization for neuroscience. I was once invited to write for Rappler’s MovePH but couldn’t commit; I followed the mounting legal cases against its CEO, Maria Ressa, even seeing a news alert on a stranger’s phone that she was being jailed for cyber libel.

Ressa would become an icon in the fight against disinformation, a battle that earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. She has often stated that “lies, repeated a thousand times, become the truth,” and I hope that truth itself can be reinforced by repetition. She has also powerfully likened the disinformation flooding cyberspace to an “atomic bomb” for its destructive speed and scale, eroding trust, fueling anger, and damaging democracy—a parallel to the bombs of WWII. Nihon Hidankyo, an organization of atomic bomb survivors, was also recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize last year for its efforts to foster peace.

In my professional life, I am surrounded by journalists, creatives, and researchers in computer science, AI, and neuroscience. I’ve had casual conversations with leading AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus about how AI exacerbates misinformation, and with investigative journalist David Troy on information warfare. My internship at Data and AI Ethics PH further cemented my understanding of these dangers.

Now, with neurotechnology, we face a new frontier: the potential for “neurowarfare” that could destroy human agency, as the brain is the very source of our thoughts and free will. I realize that while we fight cyber disinformation with people like Maria Ressa, neuroscience presents the next great ethical challenge. The world is currently debating the nature of intelligence and how to build intelligent machines.

My goal is to ensure the Philippines is not left vulnerable to these threats again. I am working to bring academics to the country to discuss the dangers AI poses to democracy and the future of biotechnology. Simon Schultz, director of the Centre for Neurotechnology at Imperial College London, will be the first to address these issues here. He will be followed by Miguel Nicolelis, a co-inventor of the brain-machine interface. They are coming one by one with the shared mission to educate and prepare the Filipino people for the ethical perils of new technologies.

This was impossible years ago under Duterte’s regime. Opportunities were denied; sending money was deemed too risky, and grants were rejected. Pursuing science under that authoritarianism was difficult for hopeful young people, as our personal lives were constantly distracted and affected by the political climate. A relative and a friend’s older brother were among the first victims I knew of the War on Drugs within its first three months. Seeking help shattered my sense of independence, but it was a necessary step that signaled my refusal to give up.

My activism preceded my full pursuit of research. I constantly remind myself that a scientist is, or should be, a humanist. Many scientists have backgrounds in the humanities and arts, and many humanists have foundations in sciences like cognitive science. Often, it is people in the tech industry—which does not fully represent STEM—who lack grounding in either field.

Authoritarianism forces scientists to look beyond the lab and care for those harmed by bad politics. It reinforces the principle that what we can do with science does not mean we should. We are fallible and make errors, but we must not allow a pursuit of perfection to be weaponized to destroy democracy, which is itself built on the premise of fallibility. This concept of fallibilism is central to deep learning and theories of intelligence. The anger we feel toward technology’s destructive potential is valid, but we cannot let technology itself—specifically social media algorithms designed to propagate anger—control that emotion.

Before leaving full-time activism for science, I held onto the advice given to me by Chel Diokno: “’Wag kang magtanim ng galit.” (Don’t plant anger over what you have experienced.) Our emotions and values are what AI will reflect. Therefore, I choose to channel my anger from the tragedies that befell my friends and ancestors into a continued fight for good. We must not create new Frankenstein’s monsters, and we must never give up on life, no matter the battlefield.

Anjiolina Nakaya is interested in computer science, neuroscience, and data and AI ethics. She is the founder of TALAS PH Neuroscience and Neurotechnology and is also involved in the Society for Neuroscience and Data and AI Ethics PH.