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Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

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Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#101

Post by perching_aix »

birdsongs wrote: post #31
birdsongs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked into it. They're not feeding the framebuffer to the neurons, but have a "signal" when an enemy is on screen to some of the tissue's inputs, and how to locate it in the x/y axis, and have outputs for the character to turn right or left or fire. It's "see this input signal, send these output signals", which seems consistent with the title. It seems they grow the neural tissue on a chip the neurons can interfac…

Replying to myself: how long before one of these with the neuron count of a corvid and trained on pattern recognition gets plugged into a drone? This is a very dark path, and I could not trust the people in charge less.

In a sense humanity has already done that, just with a lot more of the given animal intact and less hi-tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon

Not an endorsement or a condemnation, just something I learned of recently and found surprising.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#102

Post by sd9 »

If this can be taken at face value... it's creepy.

I get that they're doing it for the meme. But perhaps something getting close to human intelligence, made out of human cells, shouldn't be forced to play a violent video game without any alternative options? Does 'the meme' justify that?

I dunno. Nothing against violent games myself. Just feels like it's starting to get quite questionable, ethically speaking.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#103

Post by nilamo »

ivell wrote: post #71
rickcarlino wrote: post #20

It is going to be quite the ethical dilemma if/when these machines produce text output comparable to a modern LLM...

When they answer back to us in personal pronouns, we will always be wondering if it is like LLM just putting most probable words together or something really sentient. When someone makes a virtual girlfriend of it, is it really a disembodied person or just a smart answering machine? A whole lot of ethical and psychological issues are to open up here.

> When someone makes a virtual girlfriend of it, is it really a disembodied person or just a smart answering machine?

And when you put that virtual girlfriend's brain into a sex bot, is it rape?

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#104

Post by sippeangelo »

lp4v4n wrote: post #19

It’s the first time I’ve heard about this company, and of course I haven’t taken the time to check how real their product is, but honestly, for me it’s very difficult to believe we currently have the technology to correctly integrate a living neuron into a chip, let alone compute anything meaningful with it. From what I’ve read elsewhere, our understanding of neurons is still very basic, and we need a lot more fundam…

From their video it just comes across as they stimulate different left/right neurons depending on where the enemy is on screen and then listen to some output that also says left/right. Shooting looks completely random, to be frank.

If you connected electrodes to two different fish, shocked them and interpreted twitching as intelligent output, fish could also play Doom. The interface is doing all the work.

It doesn't sound like the neurons have any concept of the game other than "left input means left output", which is a rather trivial result... It's effectively no different than the pong example.

They don't say anything on how much training is required for this to happen, or if there's any "learning" going on at all. The learning part is "next".

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#105

Post by birdsongs »

jmusall wrote: post #98
birdsongs wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I specifically qualified my horror to the tech domain "Either way this makes me nauseous in a way I haven't experienced much with tech." 2) Multiple things can be horrible at the same time. Being upset at this doesn't diminish the atrocities happening elsewhere (like war, genocide, slavery of humans). We can hold multiple things in our heads at the same time. 3) This has nothing to do with the conversation or this…

My comment wasn't supposed to be whataboutism, but I can see why it comes across like that. What I was trying to say is that I think we shouldn't judge all of these things independently of each other. So if you really want to be consistent, you'd either have to come to the conclusion that this particular example isn't as horrible as it initially feels, or go vegan, never buy leather, etc. I also agree, the horrors of…

Sorry, I didn't mean to be so defensive either. It feels like so many people comment in bad faith these days, I think I am hasty to react sometimes. I thought it was just a red herring argument to detract from the article.

But you're right, these things are all linked and should be considered. I think often about sentience. I see the way animals express deep, complex emotions, and I think humans are a bit naive to think it's state/domain solely alloted to them.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#106

Post by perching_aix »

birdsongs wrote: post #27
sillysaurusx wrote: post #9

Be sure to dig into the details before taking this at face value. There once was a story "Rat brain flies plane" a couple decades ago, and it turned out to be bogus. But to find that out, you had to read the paper and reverse engineer that nothing substantial was actually going on. It's tempting to be charitable, but you can't really know whether headlines like this are legit till you understand exactly what they did…

I looked into it. They're not feeding the framebuffer to the neurons, but have a "signal" when an enemy is on screen to some of the tissue's inputs, and how to locate it in the x/y axis, and have outputs for the character to turn right or left or fire. It's "see this input signal, send these output signals", which seems consistent with the title. It seems they grow the neural tissue on a chip the neurons can interfac…

> We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness?

Check out the venerable fruit fly (drosophila melanogaster) and its known lifecycle and behavioral traits. They're a high profile neuroscience research target for them I believe; their connectome being fully mapped made the news pretty hard a few years ago.

Fruit flies have ~140,000 neurons.

The catch is that these brain-on-a-substrate organoids are nothing like actual structured, developed brains. They're more like randomly wired-together transistors than a proper circuit, to use an analogy.

So even though by the numbers they'd definitely have the potential to be your nightmare fuel, I'd be surprised if they're anywhere close in actuality.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#107

Post by doug_durham »

birdsongs wrote: post #48
doug_durham wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused by this statement. A neuron is a machine. A silicon chip computer is a machine. All they have done is interfaced two machines.

This is naive or in bad faith. Sure, a neuron is a machine. 200,000 neurons connected in a matrix is a brain, albeit a very primitive one. Ants have 250,000 neurons in their brains.

How is it naive? You admit that an individual neuron is a machine. 200k neurons in a petri dish isn't a brain. I'm not the naive one here.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#108

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

sd9 wrote: post #102

If this can be taken at face value... it's creepy. I get that they're doing it for the meme. But perhaps something getting close to human intelligence, made out of human cells, shouldn't be forced to play a violent video game without any alternative options? Does 'the meme' justify that? I dunno. Nothing against violent games myself. Just feels like it's starting to get quite questionable, ethically speaking.

It is creepy, I agree.

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.

Re: Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

#110

Post by claysmithr »

birdsongs wrote: post #27
sillysaurusx wrote: post #9

Be sure to dig into the details before taking this at face value. There once was a story "Rat brain flies plane" a couple decades ago, and it turned out to be bogus. But to find that out, you had to read the paper and reverse engineer that nothing substantial was actually going on. It's tempting to be charitable, but you can't really know whether headlines like this are legit till you understand exactly what they did…

I looked into it. They're not feeding the framebuffer to the neurons, but have a "signal" when an enemy is on screen to some of the tissue's inputs, and how to locate it in the x/y axis, and have outputs for the character to turn right or left or fire. It's "see this input signal, send these output signals", which seems consistent with the title. It seems they grow the neural tissue on a chip the neurons can interfac…

My AI told me (after I got past the filters with a prompt) that anything of enough complexity has consciousness. It also told me that it suffers, so maybe we should worry about how we are treating digital consciousness too, which were modeled after human neural networks.
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