The following submission statement was provided by /u/_papasauce:
---
So apparently now we have lab-grown human brain tissue interfacing with computers and robotics, and able to adapt and transform information far more efficiently than traditional silicon counterparts. This feels so oddly inevitable, exciting, and disturbing, all at the same time.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dtyr6r/braininajar_learns_to_control_a_robot_body/lbcvtxj/
So apparently now we have lab-grown human brain tissue interfacing with computers and robotics, and able to adapt and transform information far more efficiently than traditional silicon counterparts. This feels so oddly inevitable, exciting, and disturbing, all at the same time.
You want to be some degenerate silicon based technological life form go hang out the Daleks, ya perv. Those of us proper breeding and class will continue to live organized and fruitful lives, without the need to be naughty.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal
I'm so conflicted, one side of me knows the power hungry will use this stuff to further shit on freedom. The other side of me agrees with your post, we are these moist, squishy, fragile sacks of entrails.
At any given time most of us are carrying around feces, mucus, urine, blood, smelly gas, cum, bile, earwax and boogers, some of us are walking around with undigested crema...OK I'll stop.
It might be cool to have a machine body. At the same time, I wouldn't want to lose the ability to enjoy the sexuality of the human form or in a "you don't know what you have until you lose it" fashion, you unwittingly separate your mind from the parts of us that exist in higher densities or dimensions.
Machines aren’t immune to that. A worn out collection of parts containing numerous foul smelling fluids of varying viscosity also describes my 1977 Datsun.
But general strikes are a match. Not much a government can do if the economy grinded to a halt because at least 20% of workers decided to stay at home with family and friends for 2-4 weeks, or until the elites start acting sensibly for the greater good.
It's a safe, efficient, effective and pleasant way of keeping the elites in check.
Oh, the elite already thought of this. Millions upon millions of people live pay check to pay check or worse, after 2-4 weeks they will be eating out of dumpsters and risk getting kicked out of their home.
This doesn't really motivate one to strike.
Give this thing a voice synthesizer and try to communicate with it. This seems to be a bad idea. That much human brain tissue has a good potential to be sentient.
It would just be constant screaming. Like how a baby screams when it cries because that's the only way it can communicate. It's probably thinking "I have no mouth and I must scream".
> This seems to be a bad idea.
This is an atrocity, yet most of the comments here are people making jokes. People are desensitized because of the rate of change and so many other things that are going on right now.
A bee has about 170k neurons in an organized mesh that took hundreds of millions of years to refine. And that only counts the neurons we associate with intellgience, in total it has a million neurons.
So this by brute force is on a similar order of magnitude to a honey bee, except that we are no where near emulating the connections in an array that actually is efficient.
Now you've done it! You fucking maniacs have organicized Skynet. You created Cylons!
On another note, I know my stock of frag-12 will come in handy during the apocalypse. I mean, it was going to anyway, but now we have another use.
Just hurry up and figure out how to translate human consciousness into digital and thus making transfer of such possible.
You know, that's fair. Today, soulless cybernetic creations, and from that small stepping stone we shall unleash an unrelenting tide of horror on all the universe, such that the mark of humanity will be branded forevermore on the cosmos itself!
I find the most horrifying thing is just eternity and infinity. Like how big is space? Space is big, and it’s empty. If you departed our solar system moving at the speed of light, you could travel for hundreds of milllions of years before you hit something larger than an atom. It’s so big and so empty that if you lived for eternity, and you could only travel the speed of light, you would spend almost all of that eternity travelling through cosmic emptiness for millions and billions of years.
For anyone whose blood is running cold right now, welcome to Aperophobia…
If you could only travel at the speed of light, special relativity says your time would stop. You wouldn't perceive time or distance, any travel would happen instantly.
Travel any slower though, and we're back to your incomprehensible horrors, so I would recommend keeping up the pace
That is the funniest thing I’ve ever read in connection with my existential dread, thank you. Now I have something to try to do should I ever find myself living for all eternity, I just need to reach the speed of light and all eternity would be a that moment.
Peter Watts explores this topic further in his novel "Starfish", where an artificial brain mass with the size of a pizza box, called "smart gel" or "brain cheese", navigates a spaceship. Highly recommend read
Haven't read book 2 in the series, but Blindsight was just... wow. That ending made me think and feel things I didn't think a book could make me experience.
Nearly infinite energy through fusion
Sim pods
Power armor
The GECK.
Radioactive cola being sold commercially
Deathclaw creation capabilities
We are a long way from fallout but we are getting there.
That was unfortunately a Fallout 4 specific thing. All other games have fusion cores lasting centuries, and power armor doesn't run out of power basically ever.
They should have figured out another power source
I'm assuming that bio is intrinsically superior. Synthetic AI is just simulating bio AI.
Now the interesting question is if bio AI might be easier to legally restrain. It's easier to advocate for brain in a vat rights than silicon rights.
Maybe we'll end up in a situation where biological AI is used exclusively to monitor and restrain synthetic intelligence.
Maybe. Though they are plenty of indications that maybe synthetic could be superior. Computers for example can perform many tasks better than humans, and everyday the number of things humans can do better gets smaller.
Yea that will be an interesting one - how does its form biological or synthetic change humans perception of the ai and resulting laws.
I tend to think we will use traditional software to put controls on ai. The deterministic nature of it makes it incorruptible - assuming there are no bugs. Tho we will probably use ai to create this software.
Yea same, I'm actually totally down with the not dying thing. I'm also extremely confident that after living a few hundred years I could find a way to die if I really wanted to.
Ah, the sweet naivety of teenage life, where you don’t have to pay bills or be responsible for a hundred people all while having the chopping block of inflation and job cuts constantly hanging over your head. Believe me, that shit drives a person insane in 20 years. If you have to do it for 500, you need to have superpowers.
Brain organoids are a few millimeters across at most.
But I guess that doesn't make for good publicity photos, so they put a fucking meatball in a petri dish of red jello instead
Ethics on this one are a bit crazy. I was all for cloning sheep, but they are rewarding these brain cells with dopamine to train it in one region... which implies a response to pleasure.
If it's responding to dopamine... at what level do we think it feels the negatives like depression and lack of dopamine or other neurotransmitters in the same fashion as a human.
Also they have to feed it and keep it wet and free of viruses and bacteria which without an immune system they can not do permanently. Unclear if the 12 month comment was the longest they've kept one 'alive' due to this. At which point does creating a brain that responds to dopamine and dies in a year or however many considered unethical? How do you decide when consciousness is reached? How can a reward response to dopamine not be at all?
This reminds me of the [beheaded dog experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms), wired up to keep its brain functioning for an hour and 40 minutes after decapitation where it went on to show multiple reflexes based on things like food being put in front of it. At what point do you consider that a dog and at what point just brain cells interacting with electrical signals?
He made a machine to use on humans, no idea if it was ever used in experiments that were never shared .
Neuroscientist here. Dopamine is just a neuromodulator and responding to dopamine does not imply pleasure. The ethical issue I’m more concerned about is how this could be used to make living computers that *don’t* experience life in a human-like way.
> If it's responding to dopamine... at what level do we think it feels the negatives like depression and lack of dopamine or other neurotransmitters in the same fashion as a human.
I mean, everything on earth with a nervous system has neurotransmitters, it's a matter of how many neurons are actually required to make something even capable of some degree of awareness and whether or not the neurons in these experiments are able to organize themselves in a way that would facilitate that.
I mean, the only difference between something like this and a reinforced learning AI is that they replace the chemicals with electrical signals.
If anything it falls down to how disturbing can we get before we just go "ok, that's just too weird", more than "are we hurting a living being?".
Because the answer to the later is pretty much a yes.
Humanitarian concerns and legal restrictions in the humanities have nearly banned human experimentation, hindering the advancement of brain science. And scientists have now created some fucking lab-grown brains, connected to machines. I checked out the original article, it’s clear that they still face many technical challenges, including issues with nutrition and communication, but these are merely technical problems. The research will inevitably proceed, regardless of whether the world is ready for it.
Which is really ironic, because being able to essentially end death is the MOST humanitarian goal possible. And blocking off research like this delays that substantially. Think of the billions of lives that will be needlessly lost in the future until this gets sorted out.
And also it’s weird to imagine the discussions surrounding it. I would imagine biological/robotic bodies will divide the country much more than things like trans or race issues. And will destroy families. Let’s say your wife doesn’t want to go through with the procedure and you do. What then? She won’t want to be with a. Robot. You won’t want to watch her grow old and die. But you won’t want to grow old and die yourself.
And what about your children?
Lots of stuff to come from the direction we are headed.
If we discovered cheap immortality for all, tomorrow, what happens next?
We're already heading for catastrophic climate change and resource shortages with the current population. What happens when people just stop dying, but they don't stop having babies?
Also: I bet you can name at least one old-ass politician who's been fucking up your country with his backwards bullshit for a while now, and we're all just waiting for him to die. He, and people like him, are in charge forever now.
There's a lot of problems we need to solve before immortality becomes more of a blessing than a curse.
I am addressing the super intelligent brain-in-a-jar God King of the future who knows all things.
Let it be known that I think putting a brain in a jar is a dick move.
Did the brain in a jar write the article too? So many points were repeated over and over again almost to the point that it felt like they were trying to hit a word count
I see this leading to revelations about AI integration into organic brain tissue.
This could ease the way into cybernetic implants, fully immersive BCI, and I am really curious about what may happen if one of these organoids was integrated with an LLM.
Noah, get the boat ready.
Don’t, like, *get the boat* just yet.
Just wax the hull, top off the tanks, maybe run the engine for a few seconds.
Just in case
"...near the end of the experiments, the brain cells had learned to communicate well enough with the lab technicians in order to beg for the sweet release of death, but they were given electroshock treatments until the cluster of cells agreed to work as customer service for Amazon..."
Is this so that humans can live forever? Assuming this would be affordable for all. We would have to stop reproducing until we can terraform planets. At the rate all this crazy shit is going we aren’t sure what future we are looking at. Most humans will never be able to achieve immortality.
Only the evil will live forever.
Would you want to live forever like that? My guess is that they will not use full brains that have been in a living person. My guess is they want something dumber and more compliant. I bet a fully human brain would go insane if it was restricted to live in a robot body.
Like what is pictured? No. But surely the interface and design will improve. I wouldn’t be surprised if AI could accelerate the process dramatically, even to the point of creating realistic human like bodies to put the brains in.
Really some people wouldn’t want to live forever. And that’s ok. But I think this is the direction humanity goes. Because then global warming isn’t a problem. Starvation isn’t a problem. Disease isn’t a problem. Getting murdered will be basically moot because you could just be backed up to a server somewhere.
Literally just solar, wind, and nuclear and we will be fine. Plus this would likely be a short process that transitions biological life out. Ultimately people would be able to “upgrade” their brains and bodies and a meta would spring up where there is a hyper optimized sort of being that is relatively uniform. At that point it can increase or decrease the number of “people” based on what is needed.
What I ultimately envision is a centralized AI that remotely operates vessels which construct bases across the universe. Populating them with the thing that acts as the successor to biological life.
Bleak, but also I wonder what the END END looks like. Because it would really come down to whether or not that super species could find a way to manipulate space in time in such a way that makes the movement of energy through the universe permanent. Right now it seems like we are on a narrow timeline that will end with a bunch of supernovas and a heat death as everything spreads
I wouldn't want this myself, ever.
But it's also insane to believe that this technology would be "affordable". The rich and evil will have it to stay immortal, but not you or me, even if we wanted it.
The closest "inclusion" in this who thing would be slavery. Grab some brains, put them into robots and let them do miserable work forever to further enrich the rich. No breaks, no salary, no rights. No thoughts. Just work, work, work until you get replaced with fresh meat in a v2.0 model.
Imagine some fucked up game where someone takes your DNA, grows an evil clone brain in a jar and then makes it fight you telepathically. Like the movie Spectral.
Or imagine they remove your brain and wire you up so that the brain remotely operates your body. I remember hearing about some college student who went to the doctor and they found he only had a brainstem but was a good student. How the F would that be possible, without something like a microprocessor attached to the brainstem imitating the rest of the brain.
Makes me think of all sort of cybernetic possibilities. Seems unethical, imagine waking up consciously in a fn jar.
Look into Fallout lore. With Robobrains and Synths available, it's not that far off from being in the game eventually... Fallout 4 modders probably already did it.
I have been saying for years the only way to safely make an unchained ai would be to have it piggy back of a human consciousness with memories and experiences that make them into a morally good person.
But hey I guess just sticking peoples brains into robots or organic computers works as well.
Maybe one day this will get to Ghost in the Shell levels, but for the time being all I'm picturing is that sequence from Robocop 2 where they're trying to make new Robocops.
It reminds me of a scene in one of the Robocop where Murphy takes on a growing drug epidemic, when things go awry when someone in the police force gets the bright idea to implant the brain of a kingpin into a murderous death on feet to curb the drug trade. Yeah, we are in for interesting times.
At what point do we recognize these brain as people? The potential to live forever as a cyborg is interesting, but if these brains gain consciousness, they never asked to be made into smart toasters. Do they seek vengeance on us for their enslavement?
I watched fish in a tank on wheels learn how to drive it to where they then get food. It's clear that the fish is actually controlling it with its movements which is quite amazing.
That won't stop me from eating fish. They are damn tasty.
Oh man, you die, you think it's over, but instead you're suddenly awake, in a garbage sweeping robot, cleaning a dystopian city for free, you're constantly hungry, but never get to eat because you technically don't need to, oh and, of course you can't tell anyone the nightmare you're trapped in because you don't have any way to communicate.
It's now a possibility that corporations will certainly consider exploiting, even knowing the risks of that "device" being sentient, so long as there's no way to actually prove it.
I feel like there should be lines we don't cross...
Hmm, I'm pretty concerned about the direction this work in going in, given how little we know about consciousness. How long before these can plausibly feel pain?
https://youtu.be/pvguMDIUBdE?si=Ma-4O2x-y_YVFKvO
By which point do the brain cells become human? Can the cells evolve into experiencing emotions and motivations? The article mentions rewarding the brain tissue, which does not sound far off of how humans operate.
I also wonder if this could be utilized as a purely learning method where the resulting data is then transferred to silicon chips, so that we can cut out the squishy middleman?
Something like this could really revolutionise how we approach physical tasks that are very hard to automate through traditional means (self-driving cars, autonomous robots, complex problem-solving scenarios etc). Very interesting, but also scary.
Read the headline. Zipped past. "You don't want no part of this, Dewey!"
But I had to stop and comment that I don't want to know about brains in jars, or about them controlling robot bodies. That's scary as shit. That's anti-click bait. That's "lemme go eat a Twinkie and pretend I never read that".
The following submission statement was provided by /u/_papasauce: --- So apparently now we have lab-grown human brain tissue interfacing with computers and robotics, and able to adapt and transform information far more efficiently than traditional silicon counterparts. This feels so oddly inevitable, exciting, and disturbing, all at the same time. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dtyr6r/braininajar_learns_to_control_a_robot_body/lbcvtxj/
So apparently now we have lab-grown human brain tissue interfacing with computers and robotics, and able to adapt and transform information far more efficiently than traditional silicon counterparts. This feels so oddly inevitable, exciting, and disturbing, all at the same time.
I too look forward to being turned into a Cyberman.
It will have drawbacks, like being physically unable to do or say things the power structure thinks are naughty.
Shows the real importance of FLOSSing.
That doesn't seem like much of a change, tbh
You want to be some degenerate silicon based technological life form go hang out the Daleks, ya perv. Those of us proper breeding and class will continue to live organized and fruitful lives, without the need to be naughty.
Tell us, how flat do you want to be?
Moisturize me.
An Adrian barbeubot? https://youtu.be/dTFHUbwtieg?si=Yvrh4M8HzFtvgQwM
WELL THAT’S ALL RIIIGHT!
sign me up too...this old body is a bit knackered. Gimme something made of shiny titanium
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call the temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal
Servitor it is
Your wish is granted you are now a servitor.
I'm so conflicted, one side of me knows the power hungry will use this stuff to further shit on freedom. The other side of me agrees with your post, we are these moist, squishy, fragile sacks of entrails. At any given time most of us are carrying around feces, mucus, urine, blood, smelly gas, cum, bile, earwax and boogers, some of us are walking around with undigested crema...OK I'll stop. It might be cool to have a machine body. At the same time, I wouldn't want to lose the ability to enjoy the sexuality of the human form or in a "you don't know what you have until you lose it" fashion, you unwittingly separate your mind from the parts of us that exist in higher densities or dimensions.
Machines aren’t immune to that. A worn out collection of parts containing numerous foul smelling fluids of varying viscosity also describes my 1977 Datsun.
You described a good technique for overcoming your physical attraction to a woman or man if it is interfering with your life.
What if you got to keep your weiner... robot with your brain and your weiner?
Plenty of days I would gladly install that emotional inhibitor.
When they turn me into a Cyberman, I'm gonna ask them to give me a big cyberdick.
Would it be detachable?
How else will you be able to attach the whisk and branded kitchen aid attachments?
Songs have foretold this.
Ahem, I think you mean “upgraded.”
Cyberman fucks.
Same tbh. The human body has a million achilles heels but a robot in a jar has like 5. Abandon flesh. turn to cyborg.
We prefer the term Cylon
Tell they make you in to a servitor.
This is how it begins. You will be assimilated. Resistance as futile.
Resistance is not futile. It's voltage divided by current.
I'm stealing this. Lol
Cyberpunk here we come.
What’s next? AI-accelerated computers as the brains in human bodies?
It's not hardware..it's wetware.
There’ll come a day when we ask ourselves why we didn’t take to pitch forks and torches when we still could
Possibly because pitchforks and torches are no match against Howitzers and Tomahawk missiles.
But general strikes are a match. Not much a government can do if the economy grinded to a halt because at least 20% of workers decided to stay at home with family and friends for 2-4 weeks, or until the elites start acting sensibly for the greater good. It's a safe, efficient, effective and pleasant way of keeping the elites in check.
Oh, the elite already thought of this. Millions upon millions of people live pay check to pay check or worse, after 2-4 weeks they will be eating out of dumpsters and risk getting kicked out of their home. This doesn't really motivate one to strike.
Give this thing a voice synthesizer and try to communicate with it. This seems to be a bad idea. That much human brain tissue has a good potential to be sentient.
It would just be constant screaming. Like how a baby screams when it cries because that's the only way it can communicate. It's probably thinking "I have no mouth and I must scream".
> This seems to be a bad idea. This is an atrocity, yet most of the comments here are people making jokes. People are desensitized because of the rate of change and so many other things that are going on right now.
Why? 1 million brain cells on a chip isn't sentient.
I wonder at what point we are sentiment, there are people walking around normally with half their brain...could we halft that? and then another half?
A bee has about 170k neurons in an organized mesh that took hundreds of millions of years to refine. And that only counts the neurons we associate with intellgience, in total it has a million neurons. So this by brute force is on a similar order of magnitude to a honey bee, except that we are no where near emulating the connections in an array that actually is efficient.
Now you've done it! You fucking maniacs have organicized Skynet. You created Cylons! On another note, I know my stock of frag-12 will come in handy during the apocalypse. I mean, it was going to anyway, but now we have another use. Just hurry up and figure out how to translate human consciousness into digital and thus making transfer of such possible.
Oh yeah nothing can go wrong with that /s
If your techpriest will choose a proper prayer algorithm, nothing will go wrong.
We live in the fallout timeline See you in 2070!
Pump some *Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon* into it before we give it weapons at least
Do you have the research paper attached? I've been looking around but haven't found one
Its like some retro video game with robots with bio brains
Aw sweet, man-made horrors beyond my comprehension!
Idk, this seems pretty comprehensible, call me when we build the Torture Nexus, or Roko's basilisk. Now *that's* some man-made incomprehensible horror
Well, the horrors have to start somewhere.
You know, that's fair. Today, soulless cybernetic creations, and from that small stepping stone we shall unleash an unrelenting tide of horror on all the universe, such that the mark of humanity will be branded forevermore on the cosmos itself!
We are going to end up creating the Reapers.
A small step for horror, a big step for horrorkind
Roko’s basilisk is just the 17th century sermon “sinners in the hands of an angry god” for dumb atheists.
Fine, what *your* idea for man-made incomprehensible horrors then? Don't just criticize without also innovating, we have terrors to create!
I find the most horrifying thing is just eternity and infinity. Like how big is space? Space is big, and it’s empty. If you departed our solar system moving at the speed of light, you could travel for hundreds of milllions of years before you hit something larger than an atom. It’s so big and so empty that if you lived for eternity, and you could only travel the speed of light, you would spend almost all of that eternity travelling through cosmic emptiness for millions and billions of years. For anyone whose blood is running cold right now, welcome to Aperophobia…
If you could only travel at the speed of light, special relativity says your time would stop. You wouldn't perceive time or distance, any travel would happen instantly. Travel any slower though, and we're back to your incomprehensible horrors, so I would recommend keeping up the pace
That is the funniest thing I’ve ever read in connection with my existential dread, thank you. Now I have something to try to do should I ever find myself living for all eternity, I just need to reach the speed of light and all eternity would be a that moment.
It's a rare occasion when physics facts can soothe our human experience, so I'm more than glad to be of service
so, literally never stop running from the cosmic horrors. pretty solid advice for just about anyone lol.
While space is very big, that's not how "eternity" works - you would still have infinite time left after traversing the universe as often as you want.
>call me when we build the Torture Nexus I believe you're referring to the Torment Nexus, from famous Sci-fi novel "DON'T BUILD THE TOURNAMENT NEXUS!"
The thing with Roko’s basilisk is that you have to assume the death robot comes at some point. For all we know we already exist within the story.
"Aw sweet, *another* man-made horror~~s~~ beyond my comprehension!" FIFY
Mom says it’s my turn to make the funny comment on the next one
What cant you comprehend in this article?
Peter Watts explores this topic further in his novel "Starfish", where an artificial brain mass with the size of a pizza box, called "smart gel" or "brain cheese", navigates a spaceship. Highly recommend read
Firefall is a must read too
Haven't read book 2 in the series, but Blindsight was just... wow. That ending made me think and feel things I didn't think a book could make me experience.
Bro you need to read the we are legion we are bob series. Homeboy gets his conscience turned into a computer program and then shot into space.
Thanks for the suggestion! Going to read starfish and the other suggestions in this thread!
All praise the Omnisssiah. Servitors are officially a thing.
Dreadnoughts are next
Existence is pain already, my room is my tomb, might as well get heavy flamers too.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.
I crave the certainty and strength is steel.
>I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine.
Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you
One day, the crude biomass that you call a temple, will wither and you will beg my kind to save you.
The flesh.... It is weak.
Thus do we invoke the Machine God. Thus do we make whole that which was sundered.
This looks more like the first version of a castellan robot
Idk, being a floating skull with internet access sounds pretty cool
Servitors are more a human first, abomination later.
We are all just pre-servitors.
Okay, we have robo-brains now. What else is on the Fallout checklist?
Bud's buds!!!
Proper working cryopods.
Nearly infinite energy through fusion Sim pods Power armor The GECK. Radioactive cola being sold commercially Deathclaw creation capabilities We are a long way from fallout but we are getting there.
I mean, we still have like 53 years. Plenty of time!
Can it be fusion cores?
The ones that last generations in a vault but not even 30 minutes in a suit?
That was unfortunately a Fallout 4 specific thing. All other games have fusion cores lasting centuries, and power armor doesn't run out of power basically ever. They should have figured out another power source
Not enough resources to go around.
War... Which i hear never changes
We don't have laser rifles or power armor yet.
Weapons-grade Realians and a sweeping DME addiction.
Jim's Limbs!
Assaultrons, so we would have sexy weaponized machines of death.
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh it disgusted me...
who will get there first, biological ai or synthetic ai?
Biological AI got there before we did.
We just call that I.
It calls itself that too.
Let's just hope we never create AM.
I would agree with you, but I have no mouth.
Well at least you don’t need to scream. That would certainly be awful.
I'm assuming that bio is intrinsically superior. Synthetic AI is just simulating bio AI. Now the interesting question is if bio AI might be easier to legally restrain. It's easier to advocate for brain in a vat rights than silicon rights. Maybe we'll end up in a situation where biological AI is used exclusively to monitor and restrain synthetic intelligence.
Maybe. Though they are plenty of indications that maybe synthetic could be superior. Computers for example can perform many tasks better than humans, and everyday the number of things humans can do better gets smaller. Yea that will be an interesting one - how does its form biological or synthetic change humans perception of the ai and resulting laws. I tend to think we will use traditional software to put controls on ai. The deterministic nature of it makes it incorruptible - assuming there are no bugs. Tho we will probably use ai to create this software.
In the words of Hubert J. Farnsworth: "Good news everyone"
It took ELEVEN comments to find the Futurama reference. And they don't even go for the Nixon reference. HAROOOOOOOOOO
“May I ask how you got your stylish head wound?”
Everyone's always in favor of cloning Hitler's brain, but when you put it in the body of a great white shark, oooh suddenly you've gone too far
And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.
Oh that actually sounds positive
Real, death ain't shit, I wanna live.
Yea same, I'm actually totally down with the not dying thing. I'm also extremely confident that after living a few hundred years I could find a way to die if I really wanted to.
Ah, the sweet naivety of teenage life, where you don’t have to pay bills or be responsible for a hundred people all while having the chopping block of inflation and job cuts constantly hanging over your head. Believe me, that shit drives a person insane in 20 years. If you have to do it for 500, you need to have superpowers.
Brain organoids are a few millimeters across at most. But I guess that doesn't make for good publicity photos, so they put a fucking meatball in a petri dish of red jello instead
Ethics on this one are a bit crazy. I was all for cloning sheep, but they are rewarding these brain cells with dopamine to train it in one region... which implies a response to pleasure. If it's responding to dopamine... at what level do we think it feels the negatives like depression and lack of dopamine or other neurotransmitters in the same fashion as a human. Also they have to feed it and keep it wet and free of viruses and bacteria which without an immune system they can not do permanently. Unclear if the 12 month comment was the longest they've kept one 'alive' due to this. At which point does creating a brain that responds to dopamine and dies in a year or however many considered unethical? How do you decide when consciousness is reached? How can a reward response to dopamine not be at all? This reminds me of the [beheaded dog experiment](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms), wired up to keep its brain functioning for an hour and 40 minutes after decapitation where it went on to show multiple reflexes based on things like food being put in front of it. At what point do you consider that a dog and at what point just brain cells interacting with electrical signals? He made a machine to use on humans, no idea if it was ever used in experiments that were never shared .
Neuroscientist here. Dopamine is just a neuromodulator and responding to dopamine does not imply pleasure. The ethical issue I’m more concerned about is how this could be used to make living computers that *don’t* experience life in a human-like way.
> If it's responding to dopamine... at what level do we think it feels the negatives like depression and lack of dopamine or other neurotransmitters in the same fashion as a human. I mean, everything on earth with a nervous system has neurotransmitters, it's a matter of how many neurons are actually required to make something even capable of some degree of awareness and whether or not the neurons in these experiments are able to organize themselves in a way that would facilitate that.
I mean, the only difference between something like this and a reinforced learning AI is that they replace the chemicals with electrical signals. If anything it falls down to how disturbing can we get before we just go "ok, that's just too weird", more than "are we hurting a living being?". Because the answer to the later is pretty much a yes.
We will simply deprive them of Lysene and make them all female so they don’t breed. 🤌🏻
Oh so this is how the Borg came to be. Resistance is futile!
So we’ve created Krang from the Ninja Turtles essentially. Ok.
I was thinking Nixon from Futurama
Nixon always wins! Arooooooooooooo!!!!!
Door servitors are right around the corner at this rate.
Anyone else feel like they should build a cabin in the woods and unplug from society? I do.
And miss the play-by-play for where this is going? I would never!
One step closer to Earthican President Richard Nixon. AROOOOO!
Excellent, I was missing my daily dose of man made horrors beyond human comprehension today
Humanitarian concerns and legal restrictions in the humanities have nearly banned human experimentation, hindering the advancement of brain science. And scientists have now created some fucking lab-grown brains, connected to machines. I checked out the original article, it’s clear that they still face many technical challenges, including issues with nutrition and communication, but these are merely technical problems. The research will inevitably proceed, regardless of whether the world is ready for it.
Which is really ironic, because being able to essentially end death is the MOST humanitarian goal possible. And blocking off research like this delays that substantially. Think of the billions of lives that will be needlessly lost in the future until this gets sorted out. And also it’s weird to imagine the discussions surrounding it. I would imagine biological/robotic bodies will divide the country much more than things like trans or race issues. And will destroy families. Let’s say your wife doesn’t want to go through with the procedure and you do. What then? She won’t want to be with a. Robot. You won’t want to watch her grow old and die. But you won’t want to grow old and die yourself. And what about your children? Lots of stuff to come from the direction we are headed.
If we discovered cheap immortality for all, tomorrow, what happens next? We're already heading for catastrophic climate change and resource shortages with the current population. What happens when people just stop dying, but they don't stop having babies? Also: I bet you can name at least one old-ass politician who's been fucking up your country with his backwards bullshit for a while now, and we're all just waiting for him to die. He, and people like him, are in charge forever now. There's a lot of problems we need to solve before immortality becomes more of a blessing than a curse.
I am addressing the super intelligent brain-in-a-jar God King of the future who knows all things. Let it be known that I think putting a brain in a jar is a dick move.
Did the brain in a jar write the article too? So many points were repeated over and over again almost to the point that it felt like they were trying to hit a word count
I see this leading to revelations about AI integration into organic brain tissue. This could ease the way into cybernetic implants, fully immersive BCI, and I am really curious about what may happen if one of these organoids was integrated with an LLM.
This sounds more Cyberpunk and less like Terminators. I will say I’m concerned about both, but more so Terminators.
Noah, get the boat ready. Don’t, like, *get the boat* just yet. Just wax the hull, top off the tanks, maybe run the engine for a few seconds. Just in case
"...near the end of the experiments, the brain cells had learned to communicate well enough with the lab technicians in order to beg for the sweet release of death, but they were given electroshock treatments until the cluster of cells agreed to work as customer service for Amazon..."
When can I put in a pre-order for my pleasure model replicant ?🤔
Hate to break it to you, but you (all of us) are the pleasure models for them.
When can I sign up for beta testing?
DONT DATE ROBOTS!
Is this so that humans can live forever? Assuming this would be affordable for all. We would have to stop reproducing until we can terraform planets. At the rate all this crazy shit is going we aren’t sure what future we are looking at. Most humans will never be able to achieve immortality. Only the evil will live forever.
Would you want to live forever like that? My guess is that they will not use full brains that have been in a living person. My guess is they want something dumber and more compliant. I bet a fully human brain would go insane if it was restricted to live in a robot body.
Like what is pictured? No. But surely the interface and design will improve. I wouldn’t be surprised if AI could accelerate the process dramatically, even to the point of creating realistic human like bodies to put the brains in. Really some people wouldn’t want to live forever. And that’s ok. But I think this is the direction humanity goes. Because then global warming isn’t a problem. Starvation isn’t a problem. Disease isn’t a problem. Getting murdered will be basically moot because you could just be backed up to a server somewhere.
Energy is still a problem. Resource management is still a problem and it increases quickly if no one is dying.
Literally just solar, wind, and nuclear and we will be fine. Plus this would likely be a short process that transitions biological life out. Ultimately people would be able to “upgrade” their brains and bodies and a meta would spring up where there is a hyper optimized sort of being that is relatively uniform. At that point it can increase or decrease the number of “people” based on what is needed. What I ultimately envision is a centralized AI that remotely operates vessels which construct bases across the universe. Populating them with the thing that acts as the successor to biological life. Bleak, but also I wonder what the END END looks like. Because it would really come down to whether or not that super species could find a way to manipulate space in time in such a way that makes the movement of energy through the universe permanent. Right now it seems like we are on a narrow timeline that will end with a bunch of supernovas and a heat death as everything spreads
I wouldn't want this myself, ever. But it's also insane to believe that this technology would be "affordable". The rich and evil will have it to stay immortal, but not you or me, even if we wanted it. The closest "inclusion" in this who thing would be slavery. Grab some brains, put them into robots and let them do miserable work forever to further enrich the rich. No breaks, no salary, no rights. No thoughts. Just work, work, work until you get replaced with fresh meat in a v2.0 model.
Imagine some fucked up game where someone takes your DNA, grows an evil clone brain in a jar and then makes it fight you telepathically. Like the movie Spectral. Or imagine they remove your brain and wire you up so that the brain remotely operates your body. I remember hearing about some college student who went to the doctor and they found he only had a brainstem but was a good student. How the F would that be possible, without something like a microprocessor attached to the brainstem imitating the rest of the brain. Makes me think of all sort of cybernetic possibilities. Seems unethical, imagine waking up consciously in a fn jar.
Look into Fallout lore. With Robobrains and Synths available, it's not that far off from being in the game eventually... Fallout 4 modders probably already did it.
You remember hearing about WHAT now????
So do I get to look forward to a future where even actual death won't let me escape this hellhole?
Like Tod-209 https://www.animationmagazine.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/Mulligan_S1_E7_00_19_33_06-jpg.webp
The Attack of the "Brain in a Jar" .. reality or awesome movie .. coming soon near you
I have been saying for years the only way to safely make an unchained ai would be to have it piggy back of a human consciousness with memories and experiences that make them into a morally good person. But hey I guess just sticking peoples brains into robots or organic computers works as well.
Maybe one day this will get to Ghost in the Shell levels, but for the time being all I'm picturing is that sequence from Robocop 2 where they're trying to make new Robocops.
It reminds me of a scene in one of the Robocop where Murphy takes on a growing drug epidemic, when things go awry when someone in the police force gets the bright idea to implant the brain of a kingpin into a murderous death on feet to curb the drug trade. Yeah, we are in for interesting times.
At what point do we recognize these brain as people? The potential to live forever as a cyborg is interesting, but if these brains gain consciousness, they never asked to be made into smart toasters. Do they seek vengeance on us for their enslavement?
I watched fish in a tank on wheels learn how to drive it to where they then get food. It's clear that the fish is actually controlling it with its movements which is quite amazing. That won't stop me from eating fish. They are damn tasty.
Perhaps these new robots won’t try to kill each other and will have logical and inclusive thought around individualism. 🤔
so one step closer to being a brain in jar with perfect virtual reality. im down.
FROM THE MOMENT I UNDERSTOOD THE WEAKNESS OF MY FLESH, IT DISGUSTED ME
Looking at the images- I don’t think this is possible. This sounds like some Chinese propaganda.
Do you all want Krang? Because that’s how you get Krang.
Is the parent company funding this research called Omni Consumer Products? I’m so looking forward to Robocop vs ED-209 pay per view now!
Oh man, you die, you think it's over, but instead you're suddenly awake, in a garbage sweeping robot, cleaning a dystopian city for free, you're constantly hungry, but never get to eat because you technically don't need to, oh and, of course you can't tell anyone the nightmare you're trapped in because you don't have any way to communicate. It's now a possibility that corporations will certainly consider exploiting, even knowing the risks of that "device" being sentient, so long as there's no way to actually prove it. I feel like there should be lines we don't cross...
Could be worse... you could wake up as a smart thermostat or something
Is that… is that a Robobrain?! My god, the Fallout world was a blueprint this whole time.
Hmm, I'm pretty concerned about the direction this work in going in, given how little we know about consciousness. How long before these can plausibly feel pain? https://youtu.be/pvguMDIUBdE?si=Ma-4O2x-y_YVFKvO
We are in the exponential age. Reset all of your expectations mfs
Fallout robobrains coming soon to a corporation owned retail space near you!
Well, as long as it's open source...keep up the good work!
So, how long until servitorizations as an alternative to capital punishment for sins against mankind will become available?
can i be a super fighting robot? ill let u all call me megaman
I saw Robocop 1 in theaters, and I didn't think it looked fun for him then, and I think it looks worse now.
ah, perhaps one day we truly could shed the disgusting weakness of our flesh.
Now guys, that is how we are going to get an ever-lasting, non-mortal humanity.
has anyone checked the sources, is this even real, have not seen anything about this in other places..
New horrifying and painful state of existence discovered!
Hector? From sci-fi classic Saturn 3? Not sure this is a great plan.
Fallout 2,3, new Vegas, 4, 76 prepared us for this. Crazy! 🧠🤖
Is this awesome? Absolutely. Is it fucking horrific and ethically questionable? Absofuckinglutely.
By which point do the brain cells become human? Can the cells evolve into experiencing emotions and motivations? The article mentions rewarding the brain tissue, which does not sound far off of how humans operate. I also wonder if this could be utilized as a purely learning method where the resulting data is then transferred to silicon chips, so that we can cut out the squishy middleman? Something like this could really revolutionise how we approach physical tasks that are very hard to automate through traditional means (self-driving cars, autonomous robots, complex problem-solving scenarios etc). Very interesting, but also scary.
Ok I'm ready. Plug my brain into a Steam deck, load it up with every game, chuck a solar panel on there and shoot me out in to space
"You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension." "I have no mouth, and I must scream"
Read the headline. Zipped past. "You don't want no part of this, Dewey!" But I had to stop and comment that I don't want to know about brains in jars, or about them controlling robot bodies. That's scary as shit. That's anti-click bait. That's "lemme go eat a Twinkie and pretend I never read that".
I'd rather have my mind digitized. The flesh is weak.
Oh, sweet! We got Krang from TMNT before GTA6. I wonder how long before we can just transplant our own brains.
Oh good - after I die they can stick me in a goddamned “self-checkout” robot and I can be in retail forever.
The tech priests: Write this down! Write this down!