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In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

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Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#41

Post by ejolto »

cosmodisk wrote: post #40
cellis wrote: post #20

Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is…

Realistically this unlikely to be a problem in this century, however you are raising some valid points nonetheless. A lot of,if not most,capabilities animals, including humans, have are related to one thing: survival. Ability to move rocks, climb trees,or build sophisticated structures boils down to body's need to get food and preserve itself from destruction. These aspects are often overlooked when modelling AI and…

If you don't do it our funding will be cut and we'll have to power you down.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#42

Post by gridlockd »

bedobi wrote: post #6

Yeah, no. Programs and algorithms can only encode models (which are themselves imperfect) of what we already know. There's countless things we know that we don't know, and yet more that we don't know that we don't know. As bad as animal (and human) studies and trials can be, the beauty of them is we don't really have to know how or why things work, we can just do the thing and if the results are good, we have a new t…

> As bad as animal (and human) studies and trials can be, the beauty of them is we don't really have to know how or why things work, we can just do the thing and if the results are good, we have a new treatment.

If you didn't have at least a broad idea of why something might work, you would most likely never have "done the thing". You need to narrow the search space. Simulations can help here.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#43

Post by S0und »

Why do they want to model mice, when they the whole medical industry don't know shit about the mice they use for experiments?

They use mice to experiment with, BUT through breeding the current lab mice are more resilient then humans. Which can imply that certain drugs getting passed for human testing because they did well with mice. Today's lab mice are more resilient, but the same drug can damage humans.

Bret Weinstein talks about this on JRE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=9597s

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#44

Post by totetsu »

cellis wrote: post #20

Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is…

Ian M Banks explored this in the culture series. When doing speculative simulation of how another civilization will react to situation, what do you do with all those little simulated individuals when you've got the data you need. If you simulated them with enough detail, isn't turning the simulation the same as genocide?

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#45

Post by cosmodisk »

ejolto wrote: post #41
cosmodisk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically this unlikely to be a problem in this century, however you are raising some valid points nonetheless. A lot of,if not most,capabilities animals, including humans, have are related to one thing: survival. Ability to move rocks, climb trees,or build sophisticated structures boils down to body's need to get food and preserve itself from destruction. These aspects are often overlooked when modelling AI and…

If you don't do it our funding will be cut and we'll have to power you down.

And that's where it gets complicated. You'd either need to create it in a way that you could inflict these negative reactions, like pain,thirst,fear,and so on.,as otherwise it would respond with " OK, go on then,not that I care anyway".

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#46

Post by netcan »

cellis wrote: post #20

Who here has watched as much Black Mirror/Westworld as I have and know how this ends? My question is, if a robot is engineered well enough to replicate the "real" thing, then when you test on it, aren't you just shifting the torture from "living" to another thing yet to be granted the rights of the living? If you answer "no", then you have to admit that the model is incomplete and it does not in fact feel pain and is…

I'm not sure these questions can be answered philosophically. After thousands of years, philosophy can't even agree on the the morality of things that already do exist.

Science fiction and moral philosophy depict "model organisms" as physical replicas of organic ones for a reason. Our moral ponderings are driven by moral feelings, and they need to trigger feelings for the reasoning to be interesting. The neocortex court only debates when limbic prosecutors press charges.

Ultimately, the task here is software that answer questions, not software that is a mouse. If software those two converge, we have a moral dilemma. Seems unlikely though.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#47

Post by foobar_ »

hobofan wrote: post #33
foobar_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test with synthetic proteins ? https://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation...

Yes, those techniques are what we are moving towards and we are slowly getting there, but for the time being they can't be universally applied.

You do understand you are just defending big pharma and cosmetics. I really doubt any new ground breaking discovery has come from animal testing.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#48

Post by TomMarius »

heisbsissi wrote: post #12
TomMarius wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cell is a three dimensional environment where many weirdly shaped things interact with each other. It's not entirely unlike calculating a 3D video game. A quantum computer would assist us similarly as it helps in breaking encryption - it helps you search the problem space for a solution (e.g. protein shape) faster. Genomics is basically statistics.

I've never met a single person in my life that did or even thought anything worth a damn that wrote off complicated shit in the sort of blasse way people like you do. X is basically Y, why so complicated? It's easy to say everything is easy and simple when you're aware that you won't be contributing shit and more likely will be an annoyance to someone who will.

I didn't mean it's simple at all! but that most work is done using statistics.

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#49

Post by chrisco255 »

stewbrew wrote: post #27
chrisco255 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a waste of time. There isn't a model that can sufficiently simulate the chaotic behavior of biological cellular systems and the complex interactions with potential chemical treatments. Models are Mickey mouse representations of reality.

There are companies who make money by wasting time like that. I'm no expert in this field but from what I gather sometimes Mickey Mouse Models can help too. Economics is built on such models.

The GDP of an economy can be described in 5 variables. The non-linear dynamic processes like what occurs at the cellular level and at the organism level in a biological system, cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty. The complex chemical interactions of medicines with complex organisms like mice cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty, neither in the short term nor the long term. Uncertainty is an exponential function of time in such systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

Re: In the future, lab mice will live in computer chips, not cages?

#50

Post by stewbrew »

chrisco255 wrote: post #49
stewbrew wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are companies who make money by wasting time like that. I'm no expert in this field but from what I gather sometimes Mickey Mouse Models can help too. Economics is built on such models.

The GDP of an economy can be described in 5 variables. The non-linear dynamic processes like what occurs at the cellular level and at the organism level in a biological system, cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty. The complex chemical interactions of medicines with complex organisms like mice cannot be modeled with any degree of certainty, neither in the short term nor the long term. Uncertainty is an expo…

You can't exactly predict next year's gdp with 5 variables. Retrospective analysis while accepting certain variation of error is another thing.
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