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Some Scientists are connectiong i/o on brain tissue. These experiments show stunning learning capabilities but their ethics are rightly questioned.
Reading about those studies is pretty interesting. Usually the neurons do most of the heavy lifting, adapting to the I/O chip input and output. It's almost an admittance that we don't yet fully understand what we are dealing with, when we try to interface with our rudimentary tech.
I don't get how the ethics of that are questionable. It's not like they're taking brains out of people and using them. It's just cells that are not the same as a human brain. It's like taking skin cells and using those for something. The brain is not just random neurons. It isn't something special and magical.
We haven't yet figured out what it means to be conscious. I agree that a person can willingly give permission to be experimented on and even replicated. However there is probably a line where we create something conscious for the act of a few months worth of calculations.
There wouldn't be this many sci-fi books about cloning gone wrong if we already knew all it entails. This is basically the matrix for those brainoids. We are not on the scale of whole brain reproduction but there is a reason for the ethics section on the cerebral organoid wiki page that links to further concerns in the neuro world.
Sure, we don't know what makes us sapient or conscious. It isn't a handful of neurons on a tray though. They're significantly less conscious than your computer is.
Maybe I was unclear. I think ethics play a role in research always. That does not mean I want this to stop. I just think we need regulations. Computer-Brain-Interfaces and large brainoids are more than a handful of neurons on a tray. I wouldn't call them human but we all know how fast science can get.