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[+] 119 points 8 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 87 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Maybe the real hell is the life we've lived along the way.

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  • [–] 23 points 8 months ago

    Maybe this experience is just a higher being's analog of Doom and we're just cells in a petri dish running an MMORPG version it. Stupidest simulation theory ever, but hey man, we're sorta doing it so how stupid can it be?

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  • [–] 113 points 8 months ago (14 children)

    Having worked with human neurons harvested from dead people, there are worse ways to extend your life. At least these ones get to play games instead of getting poked and zapped by me.

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  • [–] 44 points 8 months ago (11 children)
  • [–] 38 points 8 months ago (10 children)

    Poke, yes. Zap is too weak to do much in live people but if I break out the old electrolytic brain lesion maker you'll feel it.

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  • [–] 27 points 8 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    You know this isn't even the weirdest flirting I've seen online today. It's a notable thread, but not too bad.

    Enjoy the shocks

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  • [–] 197 points 8 months ago (15 children)

    Taking "will it run doom" one step too far.

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  • [–] 71 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    We need to take it back a step and see if it'll run Linux.

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  • [–] 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I can imagine a new AI hellscape where LLMs are run on human brain cells in a test tube. So you're never quite sure if you're talking to a mere algorithm ... or an enslaved proto-human who might be conscious and whose entire existence revolves around answering your inane online queries.

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    A closer example would be if it could use the console in linux since it's only playing dom not running it, I wonder if wetware would be any better as a coding assistant than ai

    🤔 1
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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    playing dom

    I do not think we should train a bioengineered intelligence with guns to do that.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Is anyone else really skeeved out by the term "wetware", or is that just me

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  • [–] 83 points 8 months ago* (7 children)

    ... Am I missing something, or is this not like, the practical, if not lore accurate first step toward actually creating a:

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Next step, give it spider legs and a gattling gun!

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    I mean, Boston Dynamics figured out how to build essentially robot mules and cats like a decade ago, and they're actually currently building and improving on humanoid designs.

    They got basically acquired by/folded into Hyundai, you know, an actual manufacturing company, unlike Elon's ongoing fradulent shitshows.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    the only missing components are a minigun, robotic spyder legs and positive reinforcement coctail whenever it kills a person.

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  • [–] 74 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    I'm not sure if it's the same scientists, but the YouTube channel The Thought Emporium has an ongoing series about growing neurons to play retro games (such as OG DOOM).

    The playlist of this series is fittingly called Building the Torment Nexus.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    It looks like their setup, but I don't see any recent videos. Jan 15th was their last one. I think they have a patreon with bonus clips and advance stuff.

    Might be from that.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    perhaps they did the experiment and are now working on a video about it

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Australian biotech startup Cortical Labs

    So no seems this is a different group, doing this more professionally and marketing themselves as an ai cloud startup.

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  • [–] 46 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

    Finally, I knew when I saved this to my phone there would be a perfect moment. (Humanity is too predictable)

    Attribution: https://lemmy.world/post/43077529

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    OK but hear me out here, I think I have the beginnings of a business plan:

    1. Create the Torment Nexus

    2. ?

    3. Profit

    Some components of the plan are still under development, but let's not lose momentum. We can advance with the initial phase while brainstorming to refine the plan in real time as we progress. It's an exciting opportunity and we mustn't forfeit our first-to-market advantage.

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  • [–] 41 points 8 months ago* (15 children)

    Cortical Labs are the ones who pulled this off. They already have biological computers running on 800,000 lab-grown neurons available for ~$35,000 (just going on what a quick Google search told me) and are planning to open up a cloud computing service with its own API soon.

    This makes me feel uneasy. Imagine if reincarnation were a thing and you get brought back into this world, and your purpose is to learn how to play DOOM.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    "Do lab grown neurons have a soul?"

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I would say consciousness is required for that, so no.

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  • [–] 22 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    Personally my worry really isn't reincarnation, there's no reason to believe that that's true. But if these are fundamentally the same neurons that make up our brains, then how much do you need to put together before they acquire some form of "sentience"? Does a clump of 800,000 human neurons experience pain, sadness, a sense of self? Where is the line between an emotionless biocomputer and torturing a living organism for its entire lifespan?

    Despite the fact that I really hate "AI", that question was of course already sort of relevant for the latest AI models, even though we can generally conclude that they're not there yet at all. But real neurons are different, we know what they're capable of. How many do you need before a clump of neurons has rights?

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Large language models are not intelligent. They are predictive text applications with massive dictionaries of circumstantial sentence structures to choose from. Nothing more. They do not feel and do not think for themselves. The only time they do anything is when the API calls them to produce more text with an updated context string.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I don't know how many neurons are in a human brain, but if you made an artificial human brain, could it have consciousness?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    Maybe. That's certainly not my field of experience. But LLMs will never produce thought the way a human brain does. Certainly not without substantial change in how the tech functions fundamentally.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Sure, but is the full human brain the minimum set necessary?

    Sentience/sapience is probably an emergent property of a set of neurons needing to coordinate, plan, predict the future and oneself in relation to it.

    I suspect that AI is capable of sentience with sufficient complexity and training, but it's not there yet. I also suspect we'll be well past the point where it is there before we realize it is, but not until we make some kind of fundamental change in how we do it - we know human level intelligence is possible in the volume and power consumption of, well, a brain so we're orders of magnitude off of efficiency limits.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    It's estimated that mice have 70 million to 100 million neurons in their brains. They are capable of feeling pain and have social hierarchy. They also experience emotions like fear, pleasure, and anxiety. (We use them in pharmacology models of many mental illnesses.)

    Have you ever heard the phrase, "the neurons that fire together, wire together" ? Our neurons are in a constant feedback loop with the environment we experience. Our experiences shape how our neurons make interconnected networks, which then impacts how we behave upon the environment.

    If those neurons connected to the computer chip only ever experience playing the game "DOOM," how would they know about anything else? How could they know about pain without having limbs to innervate and experience the pain with? How could they have a social hierarchy without others to interact with? We may as well be god to those neurons on the PC chip, because we are controlling the entire world they have access to.

    What I find sad is that our society is ok with hooking living cells up to a computer to make smarter computers, but has a problem with ethically harvesting stem cells to be used to treat diseases.

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  • Ha, i understand why it would make someone uneasy but personally that sounds like heaven to me. Seriously,.take a slice of my neurons and hook them up to play doom forever, that's what I want done with my remains. (I guess the rest of me cremate or something idc)

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  • [–] 40 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I have no mouth and I must Doom.

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  • [–] 17 points 8 months ago

    Honestly? Sounds preferable to being stuck in the universe of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream..... I'll take a challenging power fantasy with some massively overpowered weapons over millennia of endless physical and psychological torture by an insane AI..... might just be me though...

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    I have no MOUSE and I must DOOM

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  • [–] 33 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Computer Scientists: We can make Doom run on any device!

    Bioscientists: Watch this!

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  • [–] 31 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    We are old gods who punish life for fun.

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  • [–] 28 points 8 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 55 points 8 months ago (16 children)

    Raises uncomfortable questions about consciousness. The only difference between these neurons and your own are the number of them and the structures they form. Of course it doesn't know what it's doing, but... Neither do our own neurons

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (13 children)

    Nueralink did pretty much the same thing to monkeys that are actually conscious. So it this different only because those are human neurons? Is human consciousness different than animal consciousness?

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I'm not sure this is quite analagous to neuralink's monkey experiments. That said,

    So is this different only because those are human neurons?

    To my mind, a neuron is a neuron. The only difference between your brain and a monkey brain is, again, the number of neurons and the structures they form. I don't see this as any different from monkey or rat or ant or entirely digital neurons.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    I’m not sure this is quite analagous to neuralink’s monkey experiments.

    Why not? It's a chip reading inputs from neurons. This meme doesn't make it clear if the chip was also stimulation neurons but Neuralink has plans for neural stimulation and it's possible this was also tested on monkeys. So what's the difference?

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    You seem to be arguing against a point that no one has made.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Yes. Because it's us. Anything not us is always going to be less valuable. You'd kill 100 lions if it means saving 1 human.

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  • [+] -7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Lions are not conscious. And I'm not asking about value. Of course we value human consciousness more than monkey consciousness. We don't grant monkeys any rights. Hell, we assign more value to unconscious (brain dead) humans than to conscious monkeys. But how exactly is human consciousness different?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    That was just to try and make the equipment work at all, it wasn't about doing anything with software. It's the opposite where you're only worried about the physical damage and infection.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    I was focusing more on the "hooking up conscious brain to computer" part than about the damage and infection part.

    Thought experiment: let's say we have a dead brain patient. You have verified that there is no neural activity in the brain beyond cerebellum. There's no consciousness in the brain. Legally it's still considered a person. You can't for example shoot them.

    We also have a 5kg blob of lab grown human brain tissue. We have verified there is neural activity in the entire blob but we don't know what it's doing and we can't communicate with it.

    Which one is more conscious? Which one should be considered more human and should have more rights?

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  • [–] 27 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Ok, so maybe 200K brain cells would be sufficient to run for public office, but you can't really call that a complete brain, containing approximately 100 billion cells.

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