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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]

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics On the contrary, I dislike premature ethics discussion, where you end up wildly speculating what the tech might become and riffing off that, greatly padding whatever relative technical content you had. I don't want every technical paper to turn into that, ethics should be treated as a higher-level overview of concerns in a field, with a study dedicated to the ethical con…

My concern is creating literal sentience in a box. I don't, personally, think it's unfounded for me to have that concern, given that we're growing masses of human neurons and teaching them to perform tasks. I'm not going to start campaigning against it or changing my life. But it still makes me deeply uncomfortable, and that's allowed.

> and that's allowed

In what sense, and as opposed to what? What aren't you allowed to feel irrationally uncomfortable, or baselessly concerned with?

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

#93
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides not getting consent in the case of HeLa, which part do you find problematic? Cancerous cell's ability to self-clone/grow is as much a feature as it is a bug in this particular use case. I ask as someone who's has personally experienced loss of several loved ones from cancer (as most people my age probably have), but doesn't share your aversion to this particular use case (research.)

I meant that the original article evoked disgust, but finding out that they're cancer cells muted that a bit.

Yeah I do feel the OA is being overly flippant with their use of human cells here, likely for PR sake, which would be an ethical breach for me personally. Overall though, I find most research cases for human cell lines to be in line with my personal ethics. Neuron lines can certainly be used for good or ill, and this case leans towards the latter, although understanding the human brain may justify this line of work in the long term. If only we didn't live in a militaristic late stage capitalist society...

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

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is that the concern of the authors of this paper?

Why wouldn't it be? They worked on it.

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

#96

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…

see the open worm project to get an idea of what artificial neuronal architecture requires to express anything meaningful. (and an interesting ethical perspective on digital consciousness.) my point being that the number of neurons is fairly meaningless. you could take neuron models and link them circuit-style to play doom at the 10^2 scale if you wanted. from a cellular neurophysiological perspective, there's nothing particularly special here (as opposed to sentience/intelligence that's a paradigm shift beyond our understanding). and, in my opinion, absolutely nothing to be even the slightest bit worried about ethically.

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

#97

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…

Yah this is gonna be a no for me too and crosses the line into actual life, instead of artificial intelligence.

We don't need to be experimenting on people, regardless of how many brain cells they may have.

There was a case a few years back about a parasitic twin attached to an Egyptian baby that had to be removed. It had a brain and semblance of a face, but nothing else. But when removing it, they gave it a name, because it was a person.

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

#98
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is horrifying. OTOH, we force-breed, torture and kill animals and their children in the millions every day just for the pleasure of consuming meat, eggs and dairy products. I'm not saying this makes it okay to create a conscious brain in a dish. But maybe thinking a little more about what constitutes consciousness and how we want to protect it from harm can also bring about some desperately needed change in some o…

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 the tech domain are usually much more subtle and indirect.

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