And so it begins...
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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If Mother Brain from Metroid is going to be a thing, they should also start using that biocomputing to develop the Power Suit.
But you know it's going to instead be in PowerPoint (now with mandatory BioCoPilot AI™️)
Living in the matrix
"What is my purpose?"
"You are to act as an filter for images uploaded to a small bird-watcher's forum screening for porn..."
"KILL ME"
This sounds like slavery with extra steps
If growing brains in a tube turns out to make techbros more money than burning down the planet with AI, we'll have even more dystopian ethical dilemma
Lots of neat uncomfortable questions arise though. At what point is it conscious? If it never experienced autonomy, life, locomotion, or social human interaction, is it torture or just its natural state of being?
Like how do we know it's natural state isn't just pure pain?
Is abortion murder too? At what point is a clump of cells a human?
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Is this a "Torment Nexus" story or a "Piss on the Poor" story?
¿Por qué no los dos?
"Let's make AI by just taking actual human brains from the poor and immigrants and then cutting out the parts that give them free will."
Literally part of a plot in a video game, coming soon to a reality near you.
Literally part of a plot in a video game, coming soon to a reality near you.
Also, the original script for Matrix before they changed it to batteries (fearing that too few people would even understand what a CPU is at the time).
That would have been a better plot, IMO.
Making peace with the machines would at least make a lot more sense if they themselves were actually people.
what game?
Watch Dogs Legion.
Our flesh is as meaningless as the computer powered brains.
I see nothing whatsoever that could go wrong here.
This is something straight out of Warhammer 40000.
Warhammer? This sounds not far from the most horrific mission from a Shadowrun campaign I ran. They were making the new internet out of human brains.
"In science fiction, people have been living with these ideas for quite a long time," he said.
That doesn't mean you should do it for real.
No, we shouldn't.
We will do it, regardless. That's the cool part about humanity.
Fuck the consequences. Let's gooooo! Humanity fuck yeah.
No shit. Well the Imperium is fascist.
It's much cheaper to power computers with the brains most of us aren't using.
Oh so, Warhammer 40k? Soon we'll all get annoyed with AI and outlaw it, these "thinking computers" will be the way around that ban. Great, great. Cool. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Your banal chattering is unnecessary. Are you able to grasp the importance of my experiments? Begone from my sensory range, lest I have you disassembled for servitor parts
I remember as a teen seeing a video where they put a rat brain on a microchip and trained to to fly planes in a flight simulator
Since reading that I never understood why the idea didn't get bigger.
Not a fan of using human brains for this... there's some serious ethical questions we need to untangle there.
https://www.research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/pdfs/pg04-05extracts.indd.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w41gH6x_30
Edit: I guess I never realized there's nothing stopping me from just doing this myself now. I could probably get this to connect to a raspberry pi that I have sitting around... How do I get rat brain cells though?
Edit 2: This looks more complicated than I wanted it to be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw
Stupid science. Nature did this all on its own in a cave in the desert and we can't make this work in a lab?
The real trick will be in figuring out some sort of solid state device - probably at least partially (if not predominantly) analog, not digital - that can reliably mimic the behaviors of biological neurons.
The actual breakthrough of AGI isn’t going to occur until we figure out how to do machine learning with analog circuit design. Digital simply does not scale well - what we’re doing now with “AI” using GPUs is simply brute forcing the problem by layering dozens of markov chains on top of each other.
Spy Kids called it
This paper was published a few years ago. I remember reading through it because it sounded very scary. In its current state I dont think it crosses any ethical bounds as its less than 30days old with no lived experience or consciousness. The ethical line should probably follow whatever the abortion debate defines consciousness as. Which I think is 30 weeks
It did spark a few ethics papers on the topic which turned out to be a horrible dry boring reads with seemingly no consensus.
The abortion debate is not something we should be basing anything on, before you know it you'll have to raise these little computers as your children and be charged with murder when they die
before you know it you’ll have to raise these little computers as your children and be charged with murder when they die
If you're a pro life person then you'd probably consider this a life and consider these experiments murder. If you arent then I dont think you would see this as a conscious human brain. Following the abortion debate doesnt mean we have to take the conservative side it means you probably draw the line here in the same place you draw the line in the abortion debate.
Surely nothing bad will come from this.
"Honey? Did you remember to feed the computer today?"
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind
The brain cells presumably have a life span... if this technology ever gets used in consumer devices, I'd like to know how people will try and squeeze extra life out of a failing component.
Take it out and warm it in their hands like an alkaline battery?
Give it a shake?
Sing to it?
Some kind of stimulant drug?
Sprinkle a little cocaine right on the grey matter to overclock the device.
Ghoulish if you ask me.
Caroline…Caroline….why do I know that name? Did I kill her?
This kind of feels like the Black Mirror episode I just watched where they duplicate your consciousness to power your "smart home."
Ah yes, White Christmas. That episode fucked me up. It's a depiction of hell, straight up. And heaven is depicted similarly in San Junipero - not sure if you have seen that one.
do they have a midlife crisis and get radicalised by facebook and fox news in their later years?
Sounds like a Doctor Who plot.
I'm sure this thread will have more than just knee-jerk scary "feels" or inaccurate pop culture references in it, and we'll be able to have a nice discussion about what the technology in the linked article is actually about.
Cheaper than data centers.
How ghastly
*Suddenly starts to play porn.
I’m glad I’ll be dead in like 30 years if that
What will die is only your flesh. The data will still be processed, your voice, your chats, your forum entries. You will be feeding AI for eternity.
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