the ethical concerns are usually along the lines of "what separates neurons in a petri dish from the neurons in your head". sure, you can tell the difference now, but that may not be true forever
No, they are not. You'll notice I said that scale feels like it's useful for beginning to calibrate your thoughts about how much mind can run on any given number of neurons.
Creating human cognizant life to enslave it to perform menial tasks like imagine porn for the average couch surfer until it inevitably dies sound ethical to ya? We've come a long way from the "we shouldn't clone people" of the 90s debates I guess... also somehow women aren't allowed to get reproductive healthcare, man the cognitive dissonance is wild
I don't see how this particular thing is all that useful however, and you have to keep the nerve cells alive, which, even if it is remarkably more capable, living tissue has its limits.
They're not really aiming to achieve all that in one shot. This is an existing research idea that this team will work to make incremental improvements upon.
Life. The missing ingredient of AI. Funded by the military. What could possibly go wrong? Never bet against humanity's ability to destroy ourselves trying to "become as gods".
Have you ever played the janky yet excellent JRPG Xenogears?[1] It's about exactly that, even including the phrase "become as gods" (at least a close paraphrase).
What most people don't realize is that pretty much all of the major players in the AI field in private industry as well as academia are partially funded or paid by the military. Yes even Google takes military contracts... Many of them...
There have been publicly available DARPA and otherwise projects about altering humans for war via neural implants, human subjects being pushed to extreme mostly unsurvivable conditions to see if they can prevent them from having heart attacks, etc for like a decade now. Some pentagon officials are on record saying shit like "what if China does it first!".
If we've learned anything from MKULTRA it's probably that subjects of these experiments aren't willing...
"The Strogg are cybernetic constructs of unclear origin, which reproduce by taking biological components and fusing them with advanced technology in the brutal surgical process of Stroggification that enslaves their minds and enhances their bodies for war.
The Strogg's need to harvest biological components for their own augmentation, and the flesh of slain enemies for the creation of stroyent, is their primary motivation, since it's necessary for their survival. This motivation led the Strogg to Earth, which they promptly invaded, slaughtering millions of humans just to harvest their corpses."
That's far from the first incarnation of this sort of idea, Cordwainer Smith was writing about starships controlled by "laminated mouse brains" grown into chips back in 1962. I would be very surprised of the Strogg weren't inspired in particular by the Cybermen from Doctor Who, who first showed up in 1966 with a similar "reproduce by forcibly cyberizing their conquests" narrative.
There's probably earlier "what if we grew a bunch of neurons and hooked them up to electronics" stories; Cordwainer Smith's work is just the earliest examples I can think of.
Very few of them end well for the neurons, or the people who grew them.
Won't brain tissues need nutrients? I wonder how long such a petri-dish chip will last. The articles sounds like a sales pitch for VC. Nothing about possible hurdles or shortcomings.
I am not an expert in any of the fields involved here, but does anyone know why they make the assumption that this will exceed the capability of modern or future non-bio hardware?
> “…in [the] future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware…”
Software and silicon has the benefit you don’t have to keep it alive, disease free, and there isn’t actual matter you need to scrape off some copper contact should something die.
and would you even get gains in training speed, for example? How often are brain cells rearranging synapses/communicating when that requires physical matter be moved around? (Ions move over synapses? I’m no brain scientician) Feels like the ephemeral nature of the current software and silicon set up is a pretty good local minimum. I don’t know if somehow adding more matter and nature goo to it moves anywhere closer to the next minimum.
They just say it’s better like that’s self evident? Anyone know why?
I wonder why it's a mix of human & mouse. The novel aspect seems to be that they're lab grown/multiplied, rather than 'freshly donated'? Rat brains have been used for robot cars & games (like pong in TFA) for well over a decade.
probably what can happen is that at one point the cells will start dying mysteriously or becoming cancer cells. they will have learnt to kill themselves, a strategy our white blood cells employ all the time, except that deeply they are just depressed.
And so with an unexpected turn of event, this research paves way for a new understanding of depression and consciousness. And humanity is once again saved from the greed and irresponsibility of itself.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadThe problem is that I have no clue where to draw the line between these two scenarios. How many neurons does it take for consciousness?
The smallest mammal on that list is the Little Free-Tailed Bat, with 35,000k.
This feels like something helpful to use in beginning to calibrate one's thoughts about how much mind is capable of running on that many neurons.
I don't see how this particular thing is all that useful however, and you have to keep the nerve cells alive, which, even if it is remarkably more capable, living tissue has its limits.
Here’s a video from 2013: https://youtu.be/1w41gH6x_30
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0KI-2QxLXc
If we've learned anything from MKULTRA it's probably that subjects of these experiments aren't willing...
"The Strogg are cybernetic constructs of unclear origin, which reproduce by taking biological components and fusing them with advanced technology in the brutal surgical process of Stroggification that enslaves their minds and enhances their bodies for war.
The Strogg's need to harvest biological components for their own augmentation, and the flesh of slain enemies for the creation of stroyent, is their primary motivation, since it's necessary for their survival. This motivation led the Strogg to Earth, which they promptly invaded, slaughtering millions of humans just to harvest their corpses."
https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Strogg
There's probably earlier "what if we grew a bunch of neurons and hooked them up to electronics" stories; Cordwainer Smith's work is just the earliest examples I can think of.
Very few of them end well for the neurons, or the people who grew them.
> “…in [the] future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware…”
Software and silicon has the benefit you don’t have to keep it alive, disease free, and there isn’t actual matter you need to scrape off some copper contact should something die.
and would you even get gains in training speed, for example? How often are brain cells rearranging synapses/communicating when that requires physical matter be moved around? (Ions move over synapses? I’m no brain scientician) Feels like the ephemeral nature of the current software and silicon set up is a pretty good local minimum. I don’t know if somehow adding more matter and nature goo to it moves anywhere closer to the next minimum.
They just say it’s better like that’s self evident? Anyone know why?
And so with an unexpected turn of event, this research paves way for a new understanding of depression and consciousness. And humanity is once again saved from the greed and irresponsibility of itself.