Sirius XM founder wants to see drones delivering pig-to-human transplants
At The Washington Post's Transformers Conference on Wednesday, Martine Rothblatt, founder of biotech company Sirius XM, spoke of her desire to use drone deliveries as a means for transporting potential pig organs for transplants.

Mike Snider

USA TODAY

Martine Rothblatt, futurist and founder of Sirius XM, says by the time her biotech company's genetically modified transplant organs are in use, drones will likely deliver them.

Rothblatt gave her view of the future at The Washington Post's Transformers conference Wednesday.

Her United Therapeutics company, which has offices is Silver Spring, Md. and Research Triangle Park, N.C., is raising pigs with genome modifications its researchers hope will improve the animals' organs for transplant recipients.

Pigs organs, because of their size and function, make good transplant material, but often the patient is trading their current disease for "a chronic organ rejection kind-of-disease that ultimately takes the life of many, if not most, people who receive transplants," she said.

The company hopes to begin trials on organ transplants from genetically-modified pigs by the end of the decade, with regulatory approval ten years from now, Rothblatt said.

And because time is such an issue for transplant organs, she envisions the organs being delivered by drones. "If you have a drone that drops a pile of books on your front yard today you are going to have, within ten years, a drone that is able to land very softly on the hospital heliport."

Sirius founder envisions world of cyber clones, tech med

Also in development at the company is Bina48, an artificial intelligent robot. "She doesn’t give the same answer any two times and there's no pre-scripted questions. You can ask her anything," Rothblatt said. "I'd say she’s way better than Siri (and) Amazon’s Alexa's just about catching up to her. And I’m sure that because there’s thousand of people working on Alexa she will soar right past Bina48."

She made these remarks ahead of a keynote by Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. Amazon's digital assistant Alexa, in use in its popular Amazon Echo speaker, is one of a handful of artificial intelligence-powered assistants in development at big tech companies, including Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. At Google's annual developers conference, the company announced a new version of its AI-powered helper, called Google assistant.

“We’re entering a golden age of machine learning and artificial intelligence," Bezos said. Amazon is testing using drones for its Prime package delivery, though federal aviation rules don't currently allow such activity.

Rothblatt looked further out to a time when developments in artificial intelligence and "cyber consciousness" create legal and questions over consciousness, an area long explored by science fiction writers.

"As our abilities in information processing and computer software and storage of more and more of our thoughts and ideas outside of our body becomes easier, more automatic (and) less expensive, ultimately we are going to have, sort of, digital doppelgangers of ourselves that are stored in the cloud and are able to present themselves to any manner of devices," Rothblatt said.

Eventually, a "tipping point" will arrive, she said, "where people will begin to claim these digital doppelgangers have achieved what we call consciousness … (and) hope, fears and feelings. At that point I think the activity will move to the legal arena as to whether or not these (beings) really are conscious (and) really do have an independent legal identity."