> We’ve combined lab-grown neurons with silicon chips and made it available to anyone, for first time ever.
There is a line somewhere here that I personally feel we should not cross.
> We’ve combined lab-grown neurons with silicon chips and made it available to anyone, for first time ever.
There is a line somewhere here that I personally feel we should not cross.
100%
We know that neurons can produce subjective experience.
This is the first time in my life that I've felt a scientific avenue of research should shut down.
Animal testing, weapons testing, medical trials, cloning, psychological experiments… had you just never considered them before? Why this?
Those things all exist within our conscious realm. “Human brain cells in a vat used for computation” suggests horrors beyond understanding
Same reason people get scared to fly but drive everyday. Humans are simultaneously wildly irrational and terrible at calculating risk.
This is somewhat novel unlike say weapons manufacturing. Also assuming that the GP is in the tech community to some degree, it makes sense they’d have a stronger reaction.
There’s lots of bad stuff humans shouldn’t be doing.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s a valid point. This neuron chip stuff is far less problematic than a lot of animal testing where you clearly have a whole organism that experiences something.
Factory farming too. The way we treat chickens in particular is out of a horror movie, and that’s in countries with some standards. Globally I’m sure many billions of animals are constantly submitted to the most grotesque torture for food.
At the very very least there are more productive ways of spending time.
We don't really know that.
Sounds like you're applying scifi tropes to real life. Don't do that. That's why some people are developing "AI psychosis" today after playing with LLMs.
The fear is that we don’t really understand what causes consciousness. I think that’s a valid fear, because we can’t know ahead of time whether we will inadvertently create a “person” inside the machine.
Unless your proposition is that no collection of human neurons outside of live birth can become sentient, and I’m not sure how you’d arrive at that conclusion without invoking some kind of spiritual argument.
You're equivocating two totally separate things
To be a fly on the wall in that ethics committee meeting...
I have no mouth and I must scream.
it is a terrifying thought.
We grew a brain on a petri dish, gave it a shotgun, and sent it to hell.
Next up, we teach it to speed run Getting Over It. What a horrible existence.
[dead]
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.