It's just "Thou shalt not grow a brain in a test tube and force it to play a 1993 shooter" didn't make any sense to Moses and therefore didn't make the editors cut.
"An old man! They don't let you live, they don't let you breathe!"
https://xkcd.com/1053/ (The alt text is particularly relevant)
Though I disagree it would be tragic to lose this reference. It’s not a good movie. It’s basically “say thing, immediately interpret it literally”. Throw in some stereotypes from time to time. Rinse and repeat.
I saw this article over the weekend and felt similarly: https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/the-first-multi-beha...
> Watch the video closely. What you are seeing is not an animation. It is not a reinforcement learning policy mimicking biology. It is a copy of a biological brain, wired neuron-to-neuron from electron microscopy data, running in simulation, making a body move.
And the simulated world they put it in is a sort of purgatory-like environment.
Still I don't understand why they would invite the extra creepy factor of using human brain cells rather than e.g. mouse brain cells. Surely it makes no difference biologically but it's going to lead to fewer comments like this.
I don't know about ants, but after a refresher on the people favorite fruit fly, I'd be hard pressed to be so dismissive - 200K seems to be plenty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302051
I inspire you to look up what is known about fruit flies' behavior.
The reason it's probably nevertheless not as messed up as people might assume it to be is specifically because it's an organoid, not an actual brain. Which is to say, it has the numbers but not the performance, not by a long shot.
> Surely it makes no difference
It absolutely should, though specifically with organoids, I guess it might not. Ironically, I would expect the ethics angle to be actually worse with small animals. The size of the organoid will be closer to the real thing comparatively, after all, so more chances of it gaining whatever level of sentience the actual organism has.
But then this will be heavily muddled by what people believe consciousness is and whether or how humans are special, I suppose.
Yeah but people have no problems experimenting on actual fully working mice already.
* They kinda do have a problem with that too, that's why ethics committees exist, and why the term "animal testing" pops up in the news cycle every so often.
I'm not imagining that (although one assumes their plan is to scale this up), but nonetheless there's something troubling to me about taking any living thing and wiring its senses up to a profoundly incomplete simulacrum of reality.
Of course we (as a species) have a long history of doing horrible things to living creatures in the name of science and progress.
These stories evoke a different feeling for me, though.
How do we communicate this to the engineers at YouTube who refuse to make an offramp for children from the infinite baby shark AI video loop?
Actually I have a thought which I'd like to share. Why don't we upload good quality/human-curated children media to archive.org and create a more human curated platform instead of shark AI video and we can upload videos for free on archive.org right now. The issue seems to be the more human filter which seems to be the issue.
Sharing this because Youtube Kids is absolutely not safe for kids and youtube is turning a blind eye to all of this because of their monopoly and also (profit? from having children watch a single thing on loop for so long)
Also a minor reason why I don't trust corporations which say protect the kids or governments when they can try to regulate a public company like youtube much easier than trying to control every device but it feels like surveillance goals more than anything to me.
I had watched some video on rabbithole/ "horrors on YT kids" video[0] sometime ago and I rewatched it again and there are even things like Animal Ai Abuse and so so much more vile things being shown to YT kids.
There are comments on that video like: "My 7 year old younger brother came up to me asking if you can drink chlorine. I asked him where he heard this and he told me that he was watching a lego building video on youtube KIDS, where suddenly mid video they started saying stuff like this."
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3PtN-CmybE&t=64s (Caution: The thumbnail is terrifying/horrifying and in general the video is not-safe-for-work while showing things are available on YT Kids so just take that into account on how horrifying the thumbnail/videos in YT kids can be)
Just because there’s demand for something doesn’t mean it should be legal to supply.
By Safer, I meant like some educational content or shows which are genuinely good fwiw. So I grew up watching Adventure Time on Cartoon Network. So curating shows like those and channels say veritasium or some Vsauce videos.
My question was that, can there not be a human volunteer curated group effort to find some decent channels from Youtube which are nice/safe for kids.
Calling the whole of youtube channels as bad might be unwise as well and mix some of it with cartoons and just having an archive/tag designed for it so that either an app or even you yourself could look at the archive tags and see which channels the videos are from and cartoons and just a more collective human effort into making a small library of things that are safe for kids?
Because kids will watch Youtube someday and they will hear about it from their friends and feel left out. You then trust that something like YT kids might work only to realize that it doesn't. Even something like rss list of those channels with something like freetube could be good as well fwiw.
What do you even recommend that people watch? I used to watch cartoon network for many hours growing up watching shows like beyblade and pokemon and Adventure Time etc. but it seems that cartoon network itself is nowadays struggling compared to Youtube kids :/
there definitely should be more to why/how Youtube kids is so prevalent. one can say bad parenting but I have seen good parents slip up in this case. They think its harmless. There's defintiely more to it (imho)
And brains are pretty complicated in how they're arranged. A large portion of the brain basically serves as an operating system of sorts, just managing breathing, moving, detecting smells, producing language, decoding language, etc. Cut all of that out and we're left with thinking and emotions.
If you have a small number (200k is tiny) you aren't going to achieve consciousness.
I don't know if it knows it's in doom - looks like all it knows is to shoot when startled. More than creepy imo.
But I don’t think anyone “feeling uneasy” should be an argument once the ethical concerns have been considered and experiment has been approved.
And then are creeped by 200k neurons that barely find a target when they're told where it is.
You can probably train an ANN with only a few hundred neurons at most to do the same.
I read the sapiens book once and it had the concept of how humanity had paganism as a religion worshipping just the amalgamation of different animals for thousands of years.
I am writing the comment on what the book said below the image of one of the things humanity has made in recent years Now we have mouse on whose back scientists grew an ear made of cattle cartilage cells. It is an eerie echo of the lion-man statue from the stadel cave.
Thirty thousands years ago, Humans were already fantasising about combining different species. Today, they can actually produce such chimeras.
The image can only be described as an eldritch horror. (Pg 449, of mice and men, sapiens)
The last line of the book is: Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want.
I think this last line is something that you are resonating with. (I highly recommend reading Sapiens if someone hasn't. I have only had animal farm and 1984 hook me up to a book so much.)
There's no way the technology to make and modify "life" including cloning humans hasn't been secretly used or attempted at least once ever since it was discovered.
It's awesome.
People's ick around bodies, which are machines, have always held us back.
It wasn't until we started cutting them open that modern medicine was developed.
We might have brain uploads already had we not been so averse to sticking brains with electrodes.
I'll go further: had we not been so scared of cloning, we'd probably have cured cancer and every major ailment if we'd begun cloning monoclonal human bodies in labs. Engineered out the antigens and did whole head transplants. You could grow them without consciousness or deencephalize them, rapidly grow them in factories, and have new blood / tissue / organ / body donors for everyone.
New young bodies means no more cancer, no more cardiac or pulmonary age. It's just brain diseases left as the final frontier once we cross that gap. And if we have bodies as computers and labs, we'd probably make quick work on that too.
Too tired to lay out the case / refute, so past discussions:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That's also sci-fi. I hope.
What I described before - using clonal technology to solve nearly every disease - is a medical miracle that will vastly improve the state of people's lives throughout the world.
As for being creepy, the things humans do to other actual sentient beings are exponentially more horrifying and creepy than making them play computer games. If the monkeys that Volkswagen tortured with their exhaust gases were made to play Doom, that would be a much better world. And they are much, much closer to human-level intelligence than this chip.
Ethically speaking, it got "questionable" way long ago; this is not a valid concern for this project imo.
this isn't getting close to human intelligence. They're using about as many cells as a fruit fly has (of course not actually functioning like an animal brain) processing signals to play Doom. The treatment of a single farm chicken is about a few magnitudes more worrying than this.
I'm sorry to tell you that you're made out of human cells and I don't think you got consent from each brain cell before firing up the old boomer shooters.