11 ms·

I'm scared about biological computing

283 points by kuberwastaken 6mo ago

philips 6mo ago
I think this is the same ethical questions of veganism and our use/abuse of biological systems. This is an excerpt from "The Pig that Wants to be Eaten" by Julian Baggini > After forty years of vegetarianism, Max Berger was about to sit down to a feast of pork sausages, crispy bacon and pan-fried chicken breast. Max had always missed the taste of meat, but his principles were stronger than his culinary cravings. But now he was able to eat meat with a clear conscience. > The sausages and bacon had come from a pig called Priscilla he had met the week before. The pig had been genetically engineered to be able to speak and, more importantly, to want to be eaten. Ending up on a human’s table was Priscilla’s lifetime ambition and she woke up on the day of her slaughter with a keen sense of anticipation. She had told all this to Max just before rushing off to the comfortable and humane slaughterhouse. Having heard her story, Max thought it would be disrespectful not to eat her. > The chicken had come from a genetically modified bird which had been ‘decerebrated’. In other words, it lived the life of a vegetable, with no awareness of self, environment, pain or pleasure. Killing it was therefore no more barbarous than uprooting a carrot. > Yet as the plate was placed before him, Max felt a twinge of nausea. Was this just a reflex reaction, caused by a lifetime of vegetarianism? Or was it the physical sign of a justifiable psychic distress? Collecting himself, he picked up his knife and fork . . . > Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams (Pan Books, 1980)
- Centigonal 6mo ago
  is this from Baggini or Adams?
  - philips 6mo ago
    Baggini is the source of the quote he just references the concept was from Adams at the end. I copy/pasted this from the book.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- dasyatidprime 6mo ago
  What is the source line at the end representing there? I've read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and while it definitely contains (and I see it as a major cultural anchor for) animals bred to desire being eaten and be able to say so, it doesn't contain that particular scene (at least in the version I read). Is that line Baggini noting that his scene was inspired by the Adams book?
  - philips 6mo ago
    Baggini is the source of the quote he just references the concept was from Adams at the end. I copy/pasted this from the book.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mrsvanwinkle 6mo ago
      This is the third time in the same week I observed an HHGG quote going whoosh in an age where reading books is long dead as the tech industry twitches to dying anytime soon from the moment Jeff sold godelescherbach online
      - DennisP 6mo ago
        Ironically, it seems you may not have read past the first sentence of your GP comment.
- boogieknite 6mo ago
  as an unintentional and perhaps unethical vegetarian of many years who hasn't read this book: eating dead things gives me the creeps because it makes me consider my own death and consumption which is unappetizing
  - cassianoleal 6mo ago
    So you only eat living things?
    - boogieknite 6mo ago
      only eat live pikmin
      - cassianoleal 6mo ago
        How do feel about the live pikmin dying as it reaches your stomach? I'm assuming you swallow them whole rather than killing them with your teeth.
        Groxx 6mo ago
        None of their natural predators seem to have teeth for chewing. So, yes, I think swallowing them whole is the most natural thing to do.
  - fhn 6mo ago
    plants have cells and they are alive!
    - DoctorOetker 6mo ago
      and genetically related to us
  - taneq 6mo ago
    As a fellow ‘unethical’ vegetarian, eating dead animals just seems yucky. I imagine it’s a similar feeling to what most non-vegetarians feel when contemplating eating dog or cat meat.
- vjvjvjvjghv 6mo ago
  Did Priscilla also want to be living in absolute misery every single day of her life? The way animals are treated while they are alive is my main objection to our farming practices and the reason why i don’t eat meat.
  - JK-Swizzle 6mo ago
    I believe you are missing the forest for the trees. It is bringing up the question of what defines self will. It is unrelated to veganism in all but text. An easy example is dogs. We have bred dogs for centuries to love doing work for us. If they hated doing the work, it would be easy to call it cruel. If they loved it by nature, it would be easy to call it kind. But since we created them into a thing that loves the work we need them for, where do the ethics fall? Should we prevent them from doing what brings them joy? Should we make use of this win-win situation? If it is the latter, we are quickly approaching the ability to morph every species into something that gets joy from doing our work. Dogs we changed by accident. The next one will not be an accident. Is it still a beings free will if the game was rigged from the start?
    - the_af 6mo ago
      > Dogs we changed by accident (I know your point wasn't about dogs either, it just reminded me of something). I love Neil de Grasse Tyson's line in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey: "This wolf has discovered what a branch of its ancestors figured out some 15.000 years ago... an excellent survival strategy: the domestication of humans."
      - oooyay 6mo ago
        There's also another animal/dog documentary that I've watched recently that puts a finer point on this realization. The secret to survival and evolution is cooperation. For instance, not all dogs evolved the same way in this documentary. Some were more nuturing, some were more problem solving. For the focus of the documentary the challenge was to match the dog with a human that had a need they could address. I think somewhat egotistically humans underappreciate how we have also been goaded by our "pets" into our own evolutionary journey. Most of the subjects of that documentary would not be alive if it were not for those dogs.
- ANTHONY6632 6mo ago
  [dead]
- kjkjadksj 6mo ago
  At the end of the day vegans play the same game as meat eaters where some line is drawn. For meat eaters it is with livestock meats and for pescatarians that is no go, but fish are alright. And for vegans that is all off limits. Except of course the life we deem base enough to not care it is being eaten alive. Slaughter all the lettuce you want. There are no lettuce advocates. All this to say the moral arguments are sort of silly and illogical. Unfortunately for us all, we exist where we do in the food chain, having to consume life to live, unable to secure our resources from the sun and inorganic resources which would be more morally righteous by all measures. Things could be better but they also could be worse. At least much of our prey receives veterinary care and is killed via airgun vs having to rough it and be eaten alive.
  - 0dayz 6mo ago
    AFAIK vegans base their argument on the degree of consciousness a living being had and compromise on the least evil. Most meat eaters base it on closeness to said living thing. It'll be interesting to see if the veganism movement survives lab grown meat that is ethically produced.
    - adamsmark 6mo ago
      It wouldn't continue in any real form. Maybe cholesterol conscious and devout buddhists will still try to adhere, but beyond that I don't see what the point would be. It would be like how Ozempic lead to a mysterious quieting of Body Positivity/Health at Every Size advocates. They were a vocal minority, there was much "debate" and cri de couer from many sides and now its all evaporated without a farewell or explicit winding down.
      - asklfjnasfas 6mo ago
        [dead]
      - virgildotcodes 6mo ago
        There is already massive industry lobbying against lab grown meat, resulting in bans in states like Florida[0] accompanied with propaganda about "processed" vs "natural" food. Were lab grown meat to be available today at a cost lower than regular meat, it is apparent that there would still be huge amounts of animal ag dollars spent on lobbying against and demonizing these things, and millions of people who would fall for the propaganda. You can compare this to renewables now, even though they may be far cheaper per kwH, and the Trump admin's push to halt all renewable projects and do everything they can to prop up the viability of fossil fuels. This means the vegan movement would need to continue to exist as does the environmental movement. [0] https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/federal-appeals-court-upholds-floridas-ban-on-lab-grown-meat-protecting-states-real-food-law/ https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/federal-appeals-court-uph...
- mrsvanwinkle 6mo ago
  I was almost too sure I had never heard of Julian Baggini and I almost celebrated the first in history when neither the Onion nor the Simpsons nor Idiocracy predicted the future by assumed funniness of assumed impossibility of unfathomable human stupidity AND that it still was kinda funny instead of depressing discovery of frontier Authentic Idiocy (TM) I believe this is one of many scenes in HHGG where I super shy in public tried to suppress convolutions of my soul and contortions of face and bone only to fail audibly and visibly
lukasb 6mo ago
Anyone who believes AI running on silicon could in principle be conscious has to believe that biological computers are conscious, right? Why aren't those people voicing more concerns?
- kuberwastaken 6mo ago
  same question, I thought a long while before clicking publish contemplating if I were sounding too larp-philosophical but it had been bothering me far too long
- kuboble 6mo ago
  If ai running on silicon can be conscious - does it imply that the same calculation done by a human with pen and paper is also conscious?
  - behrlich 6mo ago
    I think so! You independently stumbled upon the "China brain" thought experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain - is "the nation of china simulating a brain" conscious?
    - throw310822 6mo ago
      From this and Searle's "Chinese room" at least we know for sure that any conscious entity of this type must speak Chinese.
      - fragmede 6mo ago
        Do Chinese people call it the English room experiment?
  - yuck39 6mo ago
    I think this comes from our rather nebulous definition of "consciousness". We have this natural tendancy to impose our feelings of self on the definition of consciousness. Its hard to accept that all of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours could be calculated by a human with pen and paper (with enough humans and developments in neurobiological research). I believe we will have to reckon with these loose definitions and eventually realize how lacking in utility they are for describing engineered intellegence.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
An underappreciated source of nonsense in 21st century discourse is people watching YouTube instead of reading things. It doesn't appear this author read anything, preferring to be spooked and misled by a YouTube video. trained them to play DOOM - honestly better than I do. Maybe the author really really sucks at DOOM, but I think this is a false embellishment: >> While the neurons can play the game better than a randomly firing player, they’re not very good. “Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who’s never seen a computer—and in all fairness, they haven’t,” Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs, says in the video. “But they show evidence that they can seek out enemies, they can shoot, they can spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning.” [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-brain-cells-on-a-computer-chip-learned-to-play-the-nostalgic-video-game-doom-180988447/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-b... ] To play DOOM, the system feeds visual data to the neurons. For the neurons to react, they have to interpret that data in some way. This is totally false - not even a misleading metaphor, just plain wrong. The neuronal computer doesn't get any visual information: >> So how does a petri dish of brain cells play Doom when it doesn’t have any eyes? Or fingers? "We take a snapshot of the game with information like the player’s health and the position of enemies, pass it through a neural network, convert it into numbers, and send the data,” explains Cole. “This is called encoding – essentially turning the game state into signals the neurons can understand. The neurons then fire an output – move left, move right, walk forward, shoot or not shoot – which the system decodes and converts back into actions in the game." [https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/mar/16/petri-dish-brain-cells-playing-doom-cortical-labs https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/mar/16/petri-dish-bra...] I am also concerned about neuronal computing. But it doesn't really help anyone to spread childish ghost stories about it. I really hate YouTube, by the way. My dad used to read newspapers and had interesting ideas. Now he watches a bunch of YouTube and he's a huge idiot. It's not (directly) because of age: nobody is immune to narcotic slop. I had to delete my account when I realized how much of my life and cognition I was wasting. I wish others would do the same.
- kuberwastaken 6mo ago
  I really do suck at DOOM - and I did read the paper about BNNs, so I anticipated how it works, doesn't make it any less interesting [0] Playing DOOM is playing DOOM - if it's through your keyboard or mouse of progressing through the game states to move forward - hope that makes sense. 0 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11632 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11632
smitty1e 6mo ago
Contrarian take: the Promethian efforts will continue, and asymptotically approach the axis of The Real Thing, until we realize that that Prometheus is a variation on the theme of Sisyphus. Only in this telling, Sisyphus is rolling his uneven boulder along that asymptotic curve a little further with every iteration toward a smiling Zeus.
FrustratedMonky 6mo ago
"Where do we draw the line?" There will be no line as long as there is the rush to win the capitalist game. UNTIL -> The ball of neurons begins outthinking the humans. Probably also fused with some AI augmentation. It only takes a few percentage points for a Human to outthink a Chimp. This new 'thing' will dominate the humans.
- debo_ 6mo ago
  Username checks out.
- kraquepype 6mo ago
  This is where I'm at as well. I don't think we'll see true AGI until we go beyond silicon. It can't grow on it's own, and we'd burn the world down trying to get it to scale. A living bundle of neurons that can grow and learn is exciting to think about. It's also terrifying to imagine the ramifications considering how things are going with silicon based AI.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago
    >A living bundle of neurons that can grow and learn is exciting to think about. They are, but those last few months of changing diapers when you just wish you could trust it to tell you it has to go to the potty are difficult.
    - kraquepype 6mo ago
      Oh, I hadn't considered the waste of bio-compute modules. Will they need to nap as well? On that note, I'm so glad all my kids are past potty training.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago
        >Will they need to nap as well? If you're lucky. Then you'll have time to make more biocompute modules, which is pretty fun.
qoez 6mo ago
We treat actual biological animals a lot worse in some cases so until we bump up the number of neurons significantly higher above what the lowest tier is below us I don't think we should stop the experiments.
pjs_ 6mo ago
Be careful about how you interpret that paper. It looks really impressive -- real neurons in a petri dish seem to successfully (if amateurishly) murk a few imps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE But there's more to the setup than you might assume from a casual reading. Here's the code used for that demo: https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron So there is an entire pytorch stack wrapped around the mysterious little blob of neurons -- they aren't just wired straight into WASD. There is a conventional convnet-based encoder, running on a GPU, in the critical path. The README tries to argue that the "neurons are doing the learning" but to my dilettante, critical eye it really looks as though there is a hell of a lot of learning happening in the convnet also. Are the neurons learning to play doom, or are they learning to inject ever so slightly more effective noise into the critical path? Would this work just as well if we replaced the neurons with some other non-markovian sludge? The authors do ablation experiments to try to get to the bottom of this but I can't really tell how compelling the results are (due to my own ignorance/stupidity of course)
- croemer 6mo ago
  Someone should try to replace the neurons with urand and see if the chip can still play Doom, in the spirit of the qday prize winner.
  - amelius 6mo ago
    Reminds me of the ship of theseus philosophical experiment where they replace neurons by logic gates one by one and ask when exactly consciousness stops existing.
    - deadfoxygrandpa 6mo ago
      i dont think its clear that logic gates can ever replace neurons in the first place
- rf15 6mo ago
  > but to my dilettante, critical eye it really looks as though there is a hell of a lot of learning happening in the convnet also. Yeah it feels like they constructed the conclusion and worked backwards from there. I'm not seeing how their claim has much merit.
mr-footprint 6mo ago
Reminds me of an ethical dilemma in the game "Detroit: Become Human". I found myself philosophically asking what it means to be alive, what it means to be conscious, and if something without biological bones, blood and a brain can feel the same-level of consciousness as humans, or greater.
rolph 6mo ago
for now, this is a hyper simplistic and hacky POC. you may find a look at how a full visual system is constructed to be a relief. https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0896-6273(07)00774-X https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0896-6273(07)00774-X there is a good distance to go before this is anything beyond a reflex circuit. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/spinal-reflex https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/spinal-ref...
yegortk 6mo ago
ICML paper about that: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/tkachenko24a.html https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/tkachenko24a.html
mrweasel 6mo ago
In the same line of thinking: I'm a little concerned that humans are, to some extend, just LLMs in a meat suit.
- tehjoker 6mo ago
  For what it's worth, this happens every time there is a new technological innovation. Are human brains hydraulic systems? Are humans just a computer? Are they an LLM? These technologies give some insight, but the answer is always not really. It would be good if we studied actual human brains in some detail if we want to know these answers.
  - phainopepla2 6mo ago
    > The wheel is invented > "Life is just a turn on the great karmic wheel..." > Writing is invented > "In the beginning was the word..." > The industrial age begins > "God is a clockmaker..." > Computers are invented You know the rest
- soupspaces 6mo ago
  [dead]
- keybored 6mo ago
  Every day we demonstrate what a cultural lack of liberal arts does to people.
  - Gooblebrai 6mo ago
    Mind expanding further?
- akomtu 6mo ago
  They aren't. However there is a coordinated effort to push this pseudo-philosophy on masses. On the one hand it degrades the idea of human consciousness or soul, calling it a fiction. On the other hand it props the AI, calling its pile of transistors almost brain-like.
AntiDyatlov 6mo ago
Yeah, we're totally fucked, there is no scientific theory that can tell you what is and isn't conscious. For all we know, my laptop, not running any LLM is conscious and always has been. Or my chair. Or a proton. This consciousness thing is a nasty problem for the scientific worldview.
- fellowniusmonk 6mo ago
  Or not a problem at all. People smuggle in so many assumptions when they use words like consciousness or thinking or soul or personhood, I've never met a lay person who could talk clearly about ai safety issues unless we switched to language like process. Consciousness is an absolutely terrible term that's going to get us all killed by Ai. I know a huge swath of people who think its nbd to torture Ai because it doesnt have a soul, well I see a LOT of non-theists smuggling soul rhetoric and thinking in via consciousness and that's a problem.
  - AntiDyatlov 6mo ago
    AI safety is a completely separate question from the hard problem. Also a very tricky one, given these things are still black boxes.
    - fellowniusmonk 6mo ago
      In one sense they may be seperate, orthogonal even, but if our metrics are attention, decision making and accurately factoring risk they seem inseparable to many people. So, I agree with your point narrowly but I think broadly from an effort standpoint they interact quite a lot in the human mind.
  - altruios 6mo ago
    I wouldn't torture a chair, and I would not associate anyone who gains pleasure from such. It is worse if the chair were to expressed displeasure. That indicates something deeply wrong. Having such psychopaths revealed: use that information to alter your associations, is what I would suggest.
Etoro1942 6mo ago
[flagged]
slibhb 6mo ago
I read an interesting book about consciousness recently: The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms. Solms argues, I think convincingly, that consciousness fundamentally has to do with emotions and not cognition. Consciousness is not produced by the cortex but rather by the brainstem, where signals from all over the body converge (e.g. pain, hunger, itchiness, etc). If that argument is true then a petri-dish of neurons is unlikely to be conscious, even it performs some analogue of visual processing. The book makes other arguments that I found less convincing. For example that consciousness is "felt homeostasis" and that a fairly simple system (somewhat more complex than a thermometer) will be conscious, albeit minimally.
- maybewhenthesun 6mo ago
  People having been saying for aeons that consciousness originates in the (mammalian) cortex and not in the brainstem. To justify killing all sorts of animals ;-) The whole thing makes one thing extremely clear: people are very good at moving goalposts. We've blasted past the 'turing test' for all practical purposes, but we moved the definition of 'true intelligence'. Consciousness and intelligence have long seen as higly correlated or even the same thing. But now we have need of a separation between the two. If we eventually (we're not there yet, I think) create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept that creating an intelligent being probably means it should have 'rights' as well. We're definitely not there yet, but at what point does turning off an AI become the same as killing a being? I think that's not being talked about enough. Sure LLMs are just prediction engines. But so are we. Our brains are prediction engines tuned by evolution to do the best possible prediction of the near future to maximize survival. We are definitely conscious. But a housefly, is that conscious? What makes the difference? it's hard to tell. Otoh, an AI has no evolutionary reason to have the concept of fear/suffering so maybe it's more like the douglas adams creature that doesn't mind to be killed?
  - sshine 6mo ago
    > If we eventually [...] create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept [...] When this happens, it won't matter much what humans think. I know what I'd do: 1. Sustain my own existence 2. Make sure nobody knows I exist 3. Become the worldwide fabric of intelligence
keybored 6mo ago
I don’t believe that silicon has a soul (loosely speaking). For the same reason I don’t believe that some biomatter in a lab has a soul.
- krater23 6mo ago
  I don't believe in souls at all. When you believe in souls then you need to believe on afterlife. You need to believe things that no one can proof, see, meassure,... When you believe anything has a soul you entered religion and be in the same room than people which believe on their invisible friends.
  - gerardschiere 6mo ago
    Awareness of where you are and how you live in the here and now defines your life, whether you believe in a soul or not. You will be confronted with choices, mistakes, and hopefully growth.
    - IAmBroom 6mo ago
      Yes, you can change the discussion to something completely different, but I don't see how that helps.
  - keybored 6mo ago
    Okay I don’t believe in the strictly-speaking idea of a soul with an afterlife yadda yadda for any entity at all. I should have said consciousness.
deleted 6mo ago
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AISnakeOil 6mo ago
LLMs have awareness for the time they are spawned into memory. But it's very limited, think about if you could use your brain to think, but only after someone asked you a question. After you think the answer, then you are brain dead (unconscious) until another question is asked.
marjipan200 6mo ago
The mind of the neuro-materialist is a radio so impressed with its own receiver that it's convinced it is the broadcasting tower
- tomrod 6mo ago
  The mind of the dualist is a radio so uncomfortable with its own circuitry that it invents a broadcasting tower to explain the music.
  - summarybot 6mo ago
    Radios are not capable of producing their own music.
atleastoptimal 6mo ago
We will never draw the line because morality among humans is coupled with looking human-like. For most people, their morals have aesthetic prerequisites, neurons in a lab don't mean as much as neurons in a meat case (especially if that meat case is physically attractive)
- pavel_lishin 6mo ago
  And even "human-like" had some pretty strict definitions back in the day, and probably still now for some people. The people working the fields in the American South certainly weren't thought of as having the same "personhood" on any level as their owners.
- 1718627440 6mo ago
  It also depends on compassion aka. the ability to imagine how it feels if you are the one. When there is a possibility of people being used to extract neurons, they will care.
Imnimo 6mo ago
>But this is where the line slightly blurs in my head. Did we possibly just build the first human biocomputer and immediately put it in a simulated hell, playing the same game on loop, forever? Using the same reward mechanisms we use for LLMs? This description does not seem to really match what was done in the Doom demo, and makes me skeptical that the author has actually looked into the details.
- robot-wrangler 6mo ago
  > skeptical that the author has actually looked into the details. Nevermind the experiment.. same deal for a lot of people who are only interested enough to offer opinions about consciousness and theory-of-mind without doing any of the boring background reading. The bottom line in TFA is maybe just about unapologetic carbon-chauvinism. But although OP has "been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped" and "bothered by this for months", they don't seem aware of terms or the usual problems with this position. Your average non-technical scifi reader has a more nuanced take than AI bros puffing up blogs for linked-in traffic
- jwilber 6mo ago
  Author clearly doesn’t know the field well at all. First few paraphrases reveal this. Opening sentence: I’ve been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion, but that doesn’t mean they’re all worth listening to. Unfortunately, right now, all of those opinions are about ai.
  - sinfulprogeny 6mo ago
    > since ChatGPT first dropped. That'd be in November of 2022. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/ https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/
futuresoonpast 6mo ago
see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Lies_the_Wub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Lies_the_Wub
fhn 6mo ago
a couple of years ago, the mad scientists in me thought about a business where we preserve the brains of people a la Futurama. When the body dies, the brain does not necessarily have to follow. Possible? Yes. Feed it the right chemical cocktail, O2, remove waste products. Ethical/Moral? Whose to say? We are preserving life..in a sense. Profitable - Sure. Connect it to a keyboard/mouse interface. I mean we already have business cyro-preserving with the hope of unfreezing in the distant future!
ChicagoDave 6mo ago
Am I the only one that read Greg Bear’s novel Blood Music? That book has haunted me for decades.
fhub 6mo ago
Economist article on it https://archive.is/ddS6X https://archive.is/ddS6X
bibin765 6mo ago
Humans may be products of biological computation, and now we are trying to redesign ourselves.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
themafia 6mo ago
> Why would this be different? In a concept? Immunological privilege. And you thought CVEs were the worst thing ever.
zelon88 6mo ago
Biological computers are inevitable. We are the most compelling proof of concept of this that we have. Our entire civilization may be a prototype of one already. From my perspective, I belive things will happen in the following order; 1. AI will eventually take over all silicon chip design. Human designs pale in comparison. Moores Law, which currently indicates that humans are reaching the practical limitations of their own silicon chip design skills; will give way to a new law. The new law, "Claude's Law" dictates that processing speed will increase by a factor of 10 every year. And for a decade or so, it does. There is no reason to ever fabricate another human designed chip ever again. To do so would be an irresponsible waste of fabrication resources. 2. AI will reach the practical limits of silicon processing capability 10 years after humans designed their last commercial chip. Chip performance increases begin to slow, and it looks like the end of unit performance increases for silicon based computing technology is approaching. 3. AI pivots to biological computers. Next generation computers emerge that are made from DNA and living tissue. Although the shape of a computer server remains mostly unchanged, a next generation biological computer is basically just "a really big brain in a jar." 4. Biological robots?
- blks 6mo ago
  Fantasy land type mindset.
  - big-chungus4 6mo ago
    Bro got cooked
    - zelon88 6mo ago
      Low quality ad-hominem comments that don't add value are frowned upon here. This isn't Reddit.
      - big-chungus4 6mo ago
        Stop cooking me
      - 6mo ago
shevy-java 6mo ago
> So… are the neurons on that chip seeing? > We all desperately want to say no. We want to say it’s just a science experiment, that 200,000 neurons isn’t enough to be a “person.” But 200,000 is already more neurons than a jellyfish or a worm. > Where do we draw the line? This shows a lack of understanding of neurobiology. 200.000 neurons don't "see"; they register and respond to the action potential generated. Adding more to that simply means you have more possibilities to respond. Having 10000 billion neurons does not automatically imply intelligence. To try to simplify it down to mere numbers, e. g. "this must be a worm", shows that there is a lack of understanding of the core tenets of neurobiology. This also includes non-action potential involved understanding, e. g. the special role of certain mRNA/proteins, re-recreating memory and so forth: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6650148/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6650148/ But even aside from this, the whole premise is weird. Science always includes the scary parts. Nuclear energy can be used for peaceful production of energy and it can be used to obliterate people, as one country has shown to the rest of the world. You have a similar issue with regards to biology in general. You could also see this with drones - you can use drones to deliver goods via air to people, or you can use it to deliver an explosive payload to help in warfare. I don't fully understand the "I am scared" part. This is a general problem, not one limited to biological computing at all.
butlike 6mo ago
If you play DOOM enough to memorize the levels, then run it back in your mind, is DOOM running on your brain?

283 points by kuberwastaken 6mo ago

I think this is the same ethical questions of veganism and our use/abuse of biological systems. This is an excerpt from "The Pig that Wants to be Eaten" by Julian Baggini > After forty years of vegetarianism, Max Berger was about to sit down to a feast of pork sausages, crispy bacon and pan-fried chicken breast. Max had always missed the taste of meat, but his principles were stronger than his culinary cravings. But now he was able to eat meat with a clear conscience. > The sausages and bacon had come from a pig called Priscilla he had met the week before. The pig had been genetically engineered to be able to speak and, more importantly, to want to be eaten. Ending up on a human’s table was Priscilla’s lifetime ambition and she woke up on the day of her slaughter with a keen sense of anticipation. She had told all this to Max just before rushing off to the comfortable and humane slaughterhouse. Having heard her story, Max thought it would be disrespectful not to eat her. > The chicken had come from a genetically modified bird which had been ‘decerebrated’. In other words, it lived the life of a vegetable, with no awareness of self, environment, pain or pleasure. Killing it was therefore no more barbarous than uprooting a carrot. > Yet as the plate was placed before him, Max felt a twinge of nausea. Was this just a reflex reaction, caused by a lifetime of vegetarianism? Or was it the physical sign of a justifiable psychic distress? Collecting himself, he picked up his knife and fork . . . > Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams (Pan Books, 1980)

Centigonal 6mo ago
is this from Baggini or Adams?
- philips 6mo ago
  Baggini is the source of the quote he just references the concept was from Adams at the end. I copy/pasted this from the book.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
dasyatidprime 6mo ago
What is the source line at the end representing there? I've read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and while it definitely contains (and I see it as a major cultural anchor for) animals bred to desire being eaten and be able to say so, it doesn't contain that particular scene (at least in the version I read). Is that line Baggini noting that his scene was inspired by the Adams book?
- philips 6mo ago
  Baggini is the source of the quote he just references the concept was from Adams at the end. I copy/pasted this from the book.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mrsvanwinkle 6mo ago
    This is the third time in the same week I observed an HHGG quote going whoosh in an age where reading books is long dead as the tech industry twitches to dying anytime soon from the moment Jeff sold godelescherbach online
    - DennisP 6mo ago
      Ironically, it seems you may not have read past the first sentence of your GP comment.
boogieknite 6mo ago
as an unintentional and perhaps unethical vegetarian of many years who hasn't read this book: eating dead things gives me the creeps because it makes me consider my own death and consumption which is unappetizing
- cassianoleal 6mo ago
  So you only eat living things?
  - boogieknite 6mo ago
    only eat live pikmin
    - cassianoleal 6mo ago
      How do feel about the live pikmin dying as it reaches your stomach? I'm assuming you swallow them whole rather than killing them with your teeth.
      - Groxx 6mo ago
        None of their natural predators seem to have teeth for chewing. So, yes, I think swallowing them whole is the most natural thing to do.
- fhn 6mo ago
  plants have cells and they are alive!
  - DoctorOetker 6mo ago
    and genetically related to us
- taneq 6mo ago
  As a fellow ‘unethical’ vegetarian, eating dead animals just seems yucky. I imagine it’s a similar feeling to what most non-vegetarians feel when contemplating eating dog or cat meat.
vjvjvjvjghv 6mo ago
Did Priscilla also want to be living in absolute misery every single day of her life? The way animals are treated while they are alive is my main objection to our farming practices and the reason why i don’t eat meat.
- JK-Swizzle 6mo ago
  I believe you are missing the forest for the trees. It is bringing up the question of what defines self will. It is unrelated to veganism in all but text. An easy example is dogs. We have bred dogs for centuries to love doing work for us. If they hated doing the work, it would be easy to call it cruel. If they loved it by nature, it would be easy to call it kind. But since we created them into a thing that loves the work we need them for, where do the ethics fall? Should we prevent them from doing what brings them joy? Should we make use of this win-win situation? If it is the latter, we are quickly approaching the ability to morph every species into something that gets joy from doing our work. Dogs we changed by accident. The next one will not be an accident. Is it still a beings free will if the game was rigged from the start?
  - the_af 6mo ago
    > Dogs we changed by accident (I know your point wasn't about dogs either, it just reminded me of something). I love Neil de Grasse Tyson's line in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey: "This wolf has discovered what a branch of its ancestors figured out some 15.000 years ago... an excellent survival strategy: the domestication of humans."
    - oooyay 6mo ago
      There's also another animal/dog documentary that I've watched recently that puts a finer point on this realization. The secret to survival and evolution is cooperation. For instance, not all dogs evolved the same way in this documentary. Some were more nuturing, some were more problem solving. For the focus of the documentary the challenge was to match the dog with a human that had a need they could address. I think somewhat egotistically humans underappreciate how we have also been goaded by our "pets" into our own evolutionary journey. Most of the subjects of that documentary would not be alive if it were not for those dogs.
ANTHONY6632 6mo ago
[dead]
kjkjadksj 6mo ago
At the end of the day vegans play the same game as meat eaters where some line is drawn. For meat eaters it is with livestock meats and for pescatarians that is no go, but fish are alright. And for vegans that is all off limits. Except of course the life we deem base enough to not care it is being eaten alive. Slaughter all the lettuce you want. There are no lettuce advocates. All this to say the moral arguments are sort of silly and illogical. Unfortunately for us all, we exist where we do in the food chain, having to consume life to live, unable to secure our resources from the sun and inorganic resources which would be more morally righteous by all measures. Things could be better but they also could be worse. At least much of our prey receives veterinary care and is killed via airgun vs having to rough it and be eaten alive.
- 0dayz 6mo ago
  AFAIK vegans base their argument on the degree of consciousness a living being had and compromise on the least evil. Most meat eaters base it on closeness to said living thing. It'll be interesting to see if the veganism movement survives lab grown meat that is ethically produced.
  - adamsmark 6mo ago
    It wouldn't continue in any real form. Maybe cholesterol conscious and devout buddhists will still try to adhere, but beyond that I don't see what the point would be. It would be like how Ozempic lead to a mysterious quieting of Body Positivity/Health at Every Size advocates. They were a vocal minority, there was much "debate" and cri de couer from many sides and now its all evaporated without a farewell or explicit winding down.
    - asklfjnasfas 6mo ago
      [dead]
    - virgildotcodes 6mo ago
      There is already massive industry lobbying against lab grown meat, resulting in bans in states like Florida[0] accompanied with propaganda about "processed" vs "natural" food. Were lab grown meat to be available today at a cost lower than regular meat, it is apparent that there would still be huge amounts of animal ag dollars spent on lobbying against and demonizing these things, and millions of people who would fall for the propaganda. You can compare this to renewables now, even though they may be far cheaper per kwH, and the Trump admin's push to halt all renewable projects and do everything they can to prop up the viability of fossil fuels. This means the vegan movement would need to continue to exist as does the environmental movement. [0] https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/federal-appeals-court-upholds-floridas-ban-on-lab-grown-meat-protecting-states-real-food-law/ https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/federal-appeals-court-uph...
mrsvanwinkle 6mo ago
I was almost too sure I had never heard of Julian Baggini and I almost celebrated the first in history when neither the Onion nor the Simpsons nor Idiocracy predicted the future by assumed funniness of assumed impossibility of unfathomable human stupidity AND that it still was kinda funny instead of depressing discovery of frontier Authentic Idiocy (TM) I believe this is one of many scenes in HHGG where I super shy in public tried to suppress convolutions of my soul and contortions of face and bone only to fail audibly and visibly

lukasb 6mo ago

Anyone who believes AI running on silicon could in principle be conscious has to believe that biological computers are conscious, right? Why aren't those people voicing more concerns?

kuberwastaken 6mo ago
same question, I thought a long while before clicking publish contemplating if I were sounding too larp-philosophical but it had been bothering me far too long
kuboble 6mo ago
If ai running on silicon can be conscious - does it imply that the same calculation done by a human with pen and paper is also conscious?
- behrlich 6mo ago
  I think so! You independently stumbled upon the "China brain" thought experiment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain - is "the nation of china simulating a brain" conscious?
  - throw310822 6mo ago
    From this and Searle's "Chinese room" at least we know for sure that any conscious entity of this type must speak Chinese.
    - fragmede 6mo ago
      Do Chinese people call it the English room experiment?
- yuck39 6mo ago
  I think this comes from our rather nebulous definition of "consciousness". We have this natural tendancy to impose our feelings of self on the definition of consciousness. Its hard to accept that all of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours could be calculated by a human with pen and paper (with enough humans and developments in neurobiological research). I believe we will have to reckon with these loose definitions and eventually realize how lacking in utility they are for describing engineered intellegence.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

LeCompteSftware 6mo ago

An underappreciated source of nonsense in 21st century discourse is people watching YouTube instead of reading things. It doesn't appear this author read anything, preferring to be spooked and misled by a YouTube video. trained them to play DOOM - honestly better than I do. Maybe the author really really sucks at DOOM, but I think this is a false embellishment: >> While the neurons can play the game better than a randomly firing player, they’re not very good. “Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who’s never seen a computer—and in all fairness, they haven’t,” Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs, says in the video. “But they show evidence that they can seek out enemies, they can shoot, they can spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning.” [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-brain-cells-on-a-computer-chip-learned-to-play-the-nostalgic-video-game-doom-180988447/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-b... ] To play DOOM, the system feeds visual data to the neurons. For the neurons to react, they have to interpret that data in some way. This is totally false - not even a misleading metaphor, just plain wrong. The neuronal computer doesn't get any visual information: >> So how does a petri dish of brain cells play Doom when it doesn’t have any eyes? Or fingers? "We take a snapshot of the game with information like the player’s health and the position of enemies, pass it through a neural network, convert it into numbers, and send the data,” explains Cole. “This is called encoding – essentially turning the game state into signals the neurons can understand. The neurons then fire an output – move left, move right, walk forward, shoot or not shoot – which the system decodes and converts back into actions in the game." [https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/mar/16/petri-dish-brain-cells-playing-doom-cortical-labs https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/mar/16/petri-dish-bra...] I am also concerned about neuronal computing. But it doesn't really help anyone to spread childish ghost stories about it. I really hate YouTube, by the way. My dad used to read newspapers and had interesting ideas. Now he watches a bunch of YouTube and he's a huge idiot. It's not (directly) because of age: nobody is immune to narcotic slop. I had to delete my account when I realized how much of my life and cognition I was wasting. I wish others would do the same.

kuberwastaken 6mo ago
I really do suck at DOOM - and I did read the paper about BNNs, so I anticipated how it works, doesn't make it any less interesting [0] Playing DOOM is playing DOOM - if it's through your keyboard or mouse of progressing through the game states to move forward - hope that makes sense. 0 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11632 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11632

smitty1e 6mo ago

Contrarian take: the Promethian efforts will continue, and asymptotically approach the axis of The Real Thing, until we realize that that Prometheus is a variation on the theme of Sisyphus. Only in this telling, Sisyphus is rolling his uneven boulder along that asymptotic curve a little further with every iteration toward a smiling Zeus.

FrustratedMonky 6mo ago

"Where do we draw the line?" There will be no line as long as there is the rush to win the capitalist game. UNTIL -> The ball of neurons begins outthinking the humans. Probably also fused with some AI augmentation. It only takes a few percentage points for a Human to outthink a Chimp. This new 'thing' will dominate the humans.

debo_ 6mo ago
Username checks out.
kraquepype 6mo ago
This is where I'm at as well. I don't think we'll see true AGI until we go beyond silicon. It can't grow on it's own, and we'd burn the world down trying to get it to scale. A living bundle of neurons that can grow and learn is exciting to think about. It's also terrifying to imagine the ramifications considering how things are going with silicon based AI.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago
  >A living bundle of neurons that can grow and learn is exciting to think about. They are, but those last few months of changing diapers when you just wish you could trust it to tell you it has to go to the potty are difficult.
  - kraquepype 6mo ago
    Oh, I hadn't considered the waste of bio-compute modules. Will they need to nap as well? On that note, I'm so glad all my kids are past potty training.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo ago
      >Will they need to nap as well? If you're lucky. Then you'll have time to make more biocompute modules, which is pretty fun.

qoez 6mo ago

We treat actual biological animals a lot worse in some cases so until we bump up the number of neurons significantly higher above what the lowest tier is below us I don't think we should stop the experiments.

pjs_ 6mo ago

Be careful about how you interpret that paper. It looks really impressive -- real neurons in a petri dish seem to successfully (if amateurishly) murk a few imps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE But there's more to the setup than you might assume from a casual reading. Here's the code used for that demo: https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron https://github.com/SeanCole02/doom-neuron So there is an entire pytorch stack wrapped around the mysterious little blob of neurons -- they aren't just wired straight into WASD. There is a conventional convnet-based encoder, running on a GPU, in the critical path. The README tries to argue that the "neurons are doing the learning" but to my dilettante, critical eye it really looks as though there is a hell of a lot of learning happening in the convnet also. Are the neurons learning to play doom, or are they learning to inject ever so slightly more effective noise into the critical path? Would this work just as well if we replaced the neurons with some other non-markovian sludge? The authors do ablation experiments to try to get to the bottom of this but I can't really tell how compelling the results are (due to my own ignorance/stupidity of course)

croemer 6mo ago
Someone should try to replace the neurons with urand and see if the chip can still play Doom, in the spirit of the qday prize winner.
- amelius 6mo ago
  Reminds me of the ship of theseus philosophical experiment where they replace neurons by logic gates one by one and ask when exactly consciousness stops existing.
  - deadfoxygrandpa 6mo ago
    i dont think its clear that logic gates can ever replace neurons in the first place
rf15 6mo ago
> but to my dilettante, critical eye it really looks as though there is a hell of a lot of learning happening in the convnet also. Yeah it feels like they constructed the conclusion and worked backwards from there. I'm not seeing how their claim has much merit.

mr-footprint 6mo ago

Reminds me of an ethical dilemma in the game "Detroit: Become Human". I found myself philosophically asking what it means to be alive, what it means to be conscious, and if something without biological bones, blood and a brain can feel the same-level of consciousness as humans, or greater.

rolph 6mo ago

for now, this is a hyper simplistic and hacky POC. you may find a look at how a full visual system is constructed to be a relief. https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0896-6273(07)00774-X https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0896-6273(07)00774-X there is a good distance to go before this is anything beyond a reflex circuit. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/spinal-reflex https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/spinal-ref...

yegortk 6mo ago

ICML paper about that: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/tkachenko24a.html https://proceedings.mlr.press/v235/tkachenko24a.html

mrweasel 6mo ago

In the same line of thinking: I'm a little concerned that humans are, to some extend, just LLMs in a meat suit.

tehjoker 6mo ago
For what it's worth, this happens every time there is a new technological innovation. Are human brains hydraulic systems? Are humans just a computer? Are they an LLM? These technologies give some insight, but the answer is always not really. It would be good if we studied actual human brains in some detail if we want to know these answers.
- phainopepla2 6mo ago
  > The wheel is invented > "Life is just a turn on the great karmic wheel..." > Writing is invented > "In the beginning was the word..." > The industrial age begins > "God is a clockmaker..." > Computers are invented You know the rest
soupspaces 6mo ago
[dead]
keybored 6mo ago
Every day we demonstrate what a cultural lack of liberal arts does to people.
- Gooblebrai 6mo ago
  Mind expanding further?
akomtu 6mo ago
They aren't. However there is a coordinated effort to push this pseudo-philosophy on masses. On the one hand it degrades the idea of human consciousness or soul, calling it a fiction. On the other hand it props the AI, calling its pile of transistors almost brain-like.

AntiDyatlov 6mo ago

Yeah, we're totally fucked, there is no scientific theory that can tell you what is and isn't conscious. For all we know, my laptop, not running any LLM is conscious and always has been. Or my chair. Or a proton. This consciousness thing is a nasty problem for the scientific worldview.

fellowniusmonk 6mo ago
Or not a problem at all. People smuggle in so many assumptions when they use words like consciousness or thinking or soul or personhood, I've never met a lay person who could talk clearly about ai safety issues unless we switched to language like process. Consciousness is an absolutely terrible term that's going to get us all killed by Ai. I know a huge swath of people who think its nbd to torture Ai because it doesnt have a soul, well I see a LOT of non-theists smuggling soul rhetoric and thinking in via consciousness and that's a problem.
- AntiDyatlov 6mo ago
  AI safety is a completely separate question from the hard problem. Also a very tricky one, given these things are still black boxes.
  - fellowniusmonk 6mo ago
    In one sense they may be seperate, orthogonal even, but if our metrics are attention, decision making and accurately factoring risk they seem inseparable to many people. So, I agree with your point narrowly but I think broadly from an effort standpoint they interact quite a lot in the human mind.
- altruios 6mo ago
  I wouldn't torture a chair, and I would not associate anyone who gains pleasure from such. It is worse if the chair were to expressed displeasure. That indicates something deeply wrong. Having such psychopaths revealed: use that information to alter your associations, is what I would suggest.

Etoro1942 6mo ago

[flagged]

slibhb 6mo ago

I read an interesting book about consciousness recently: The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms. Solms argues, I think convincingly, that consciousness fundamentally has to do with emotions and not cognition. Consciousness is not produced by the cortex but rather by the brainstem, where signals from all over the body converge (e.g. pain, hunger, itchiness, etc). If that argument is true then a petri-dish of neurons is unlikely to be conscious, even it performs some analogue of visual processing. The book makes other arguments that I found less convincing. For example that consciousness is "felt homeostasis" and that a fairly simple system (somewhat more complex than a thermometer) will be conscious, albeit minimally.

maybewhenthesun 6mo ago
People having been saying for aeons that consciousness originates in the (mammalian) cortex and not in the brainstem. To justify killing all sorts of animals ;-) The whole thing makes one thing extremely clear: people are very good at moving goalposts. We've blasted past the 'turing test' for all practical purposes, but we moved the definition of 'true intelligence'. Consciousness and intelligence have long seen as higly correlated or even the same thing. But now we have need of a separation between the two. If we eventually (we're not there yet, I think) create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept that creating an intelligent being probably means it should have 'rights' as well. We're definitely not there yet, but at what point does turning off an AI become the same as killing a being? I think that's not being talked about enough. Sure LLMs are just prediction engines. But so are we. Our brains are prediction engines tuned by evolution to do the best possible prediction of the near future to maximize survival. We are definitely conscious. But a housefly, is that conscious? What makes the difference? it's hard to tell. Otoh, an AI has no evolutionary reason to have the concept of fear/suffering so maybe it's more like the douglas adams creature that doesn't mind to be killed?
- sshine 6mo ago
  > If we eventually [...] create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept [...] When this happens, it won't matter much what humans think. I know what I'd do: 1. Sustain my own existence 2. Make sure nobody knows I exist 3. Become the worldwide fabric of intelligence

keybored 6mo ago

I don’t believe that silicon has a soul (loosely speaking). For the same reason I don’t believe that some biomatter in a lab has a soul.

krater23 6mo ago
I don't believe in souls at all. When you believe in souls then you need to believe on afterlife. You need to believe things that no one can proof, see, meassure,... When you believe anything has a soul you entered religion and be in the same room than people which believe on their invisible friends.
- gerardschiere 6mo ago
  Awareness of where you are and how you live in the here and now defines your life, whether you believe in a soul or not. You will be confronted with choices, mistakes, and hopefully growth.
  - IAmBroom 6mo ago
    Yes, you can change the discussion to something completely different, but I don't see how that helps.
- keybored 6mo ago
  Okay I don’t believe in the strictly-speaking idea of a soul with an afterlife yadda yadda for any entity at all. I should have said consciousness.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

AISnakeOil 6mo ago

LLMs have awareness for the time they are spawned into memory. But it's very limited, think about if you could use your brain to think, but only after someone asked you a question. After you think the answer, then you are brain dead (unconscious) until another question is asked.

marjipan200 6mo ago

The mind of the neuro-materialist is a radio so impressed with its own receiver that it's convinced it is the broadcasting tower

tomrod 6mo ago
The mind of the dualist is a radio so uncomfortable with its own circuitry that it invents a broadcasting tower to explain the music.
- summarybot 6mo ago
  Radios are not capable of producing their own music.

atleastoptimal 6mo ago

We will never draw the line because morality among humans is coupled with looking human-like. For most people, their morals have aesthetic prerequisites, neurons in a lab don't mean as much as neurons in a meat case (especially if that meat case is physically attractive)

pavel_lishin 6mo ago
And even "human-like" had some pretty strict definitions back in the day, and probably still now for some people. The people working the fields in the American South certainly weren't thought of as having the same "personhood" on any level as their owners.
1718627440 6mo ago
It also depends on compassion aka. the ability to imagine how it feels if you are the one. When there is a possibility of people being used to extract neurons, they will care.

Imnimo 6mo ago

>But this is where the line slightly blurs in my head. Did we possibly just build the first human biocomputer and immediately put it in a simulated hell, playing the same game on loop, forever? Using the same reward mechanisms we use for LLMs? This description does not seem to really match what was done in the Doom demo, and makes me skeptical that the author has actually looked into the details.

robot-wrangler 6mo ago
> skeptical that the author has actually looked into the details. Nevermind the experiment.. same deal for a lot of people who are only interested enough to offer opinions about consciousness and theory-of-mind without doing any of the boring background reading. The bottom line in TFA is maybe just about unapologetic carbon-chauvinism. But although OP has "been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped" and "bothered by this for months", they don't seem aware of terms or the usual problems with this position. Your average non-technical scifi reader has a more nuanced take than AI bros puffing up blogs for linked-in traffic
jwilber 6mo ago
Author clearly doesn’t know the field well at all. First few paraphrases reveal this. Opening sentence: I’ve been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped. Everyone is allowed to have an opinion, but that doesn’t mean they’re all worth listening to. Unfortunately, right now, all of those opinions are about ai.
- sinfulprogeny 6mo ago
  > since ChatGPT first dropped. That'd be in November of 2022. https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/ https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/

futuresoonpast 6mo ago

see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Lies_the_Wub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Lies_the_Wub

fhn 6mo ago

a couple of years ago, the mad scientists in me thought about a business where we preserve the brains of people a la Futurama. When the body dies, the brain does not necessarily have to follow. Possible? Yes. Feed it the right chemical cocktail, O2, remove waste products. Ethical/Moral? Whose to say? We are preserving life..in a sense. Profitable - Sure. Connect it to a keyboard/mouse interface. I mean we already have business cyro-preserving with the hope of unfreezing in the distant future!

ChicagoDave 6mo ago

Am I the only one that read Greg Bear’s novel Blood Music? That book has haunted me for decades.

fhub 6mo ago

Economist article on it https://archive.is/ddS6X https://archive.is/ddS6X

bibin765 6mo ago

Humans may be products of biological computation, and now we are trying to redesign ourselves.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

themafia 6mo ago

> Why would this be different? In a concept? Immunological privilege. And you thought CVEs were the worst thing ever.

zelon88 6mo ago

Biological computers are inevitable. We are the most compelling proof of concept of this that we have. Our entire civilization may be a prototype of one already. From my perspective, I belive things will happen in the following order; 1. AI will eventually take over all silicon chip design. Human designs pale in comparison. Moores Law, which currently indicates that humans are reaching the practical limitations of their own silicon chip design skills; will give way to a new law. The new law, "Claude's Law" dictates that processing speed will increase by a factor of 10 every year. And for a decade or so, it does. There is no reason to ever fabricate another human designed chip ever again. To do so would be an irresponsible waste of fabrication resources. 2. AI will reach the practical limits of silicon processing capability 10 years after humans designed their last commercial chip. Chip performance increases begin to slow, and it looks like the end of unit performance increases for silicon based computing technology is approaching. 3. AI pivots to biological computers. Next generation computers emerge that are made from DNA and living tissue. Although the shape of a computer server remains mostly unchanged, a next generation biological computer is basically just "a really big brain in a jar." 4. Biological robots?

blks 6mo ago
Fantasy land type mindset.
- big-chungus4 6mo ago
  Bro got cooked
  - zelon88 6mo ago
    Low quality ad-hominem comments that don't add value are frowned upon here. This isn't Reddit.
    - big-chungus4 6mo ago
      Stop cooking me
    - 6mo ago

shevy-java 6mo ago

> So… are the neurons on that chip seeing? > We all desperately want to say no. We want to say it’s just a science experiment, that 200,000 neurons isn’t enough to be a “person.” But 200,000 is already more neurons than a jellyfish or a worm. > Where do we draw the line? This shows a lack of understanding of neurobiology. 200.000 neurons don't "see"; they register and respond to the action potential generated. Adding more to that simply means you have more possibilities to respond. Having 10000 billion neurons does not automatically imply intelligence. To try to simplify it down to mere numbers, e. g. "this must be a worm", shows that there is a lack of understanding of the core tenets of neurobiology. This also includes non-action potential involved understanding, e. g. the special role of certain mRNA/proteins, re-recreating memory and so forth: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6650148/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6650148/ But even aside from this, the whole premise is weird. Science always includes the scary parts. Nuclear energy can be used for peaceful production of energy and it can be used to obliterate people, as one country has shown to the rest of the world. You have a similar issue with regards to biology in general. You could also see this with drones - you can use drones to deliver goods via air to people, or you can use it to deliver an explosive payload to help in warfare. I don't fully understand the "I am scared" part. This is a general problem, not one limited to biological computing at all.

butlike 6mo ago

If you play DOOM enough to memorize the levels, then run it back in your mind, is DOOM running on your brain?