Supposedly we have now taken the fruit fly connectome and put it in a physics simulator. Given the right stimulus, it apparently walks around, grooms its antennae, and drinks virtual fluids. If...
Supposedly we have now taken the fruit fly connectome and put it in a physics simulator. Given the right stimulus, it apparently walks around, grooms its antennae, and drinks virtual fluids.
Watch the video closely. What you are seeing is not an animation. It is not a reinforcement learning policy mimicking biology. It is a copy of a biological brain, wired neuron-to-neuron from electron microscopy data, running in simulation, making a body move. The ghost is no longer in the machine. The machine is becoming the ghost.
I personally don't believe insects to be conscious, but we're barreling towards an ethically complicated future. Still, very cool stuff. Without thinking of further iterations, it would be very...
I personally don't believe insects to be conscious, but we're barreling towards an ethically complicated future. Still, very cool stuff. Without thinking of further iterations, it would be very interesting to test fly traps on simulated flies - rapidly iterating until you have the perfect trap. Or maybe do the same for mosquitos to curb malaria.
Edit: Now I want to write a sci-fi story where someone designs the perfect mosquito trap, hijacking their senses with a device created after billions of simulations with virtual mosquitos. Any mosquito within a couple of meters of it appears to be sucked in like a vacuum, but really they're flying directly at the device through no choice of their own. The appearance, shape, and scent of the object is perfectly tuned to cause your average mosquito to direct themselves into it.
100% we are barreling towards something difficult. “Ethically complicated” is the undersell of the decade. For some reasons as to why, I implore everyone curious enough to check out this thread in...
100% we are barreling towards something difficult. “Ethically complicated” is the undersell of the decade.
For some reasons as to why, I implore everyone curious enough to check out this thread in the first place to read https://qntm.org/mmacevedo.
It’s essentially sci-fi horror written as a future Wikipedia-style article.
It’s a nice piece of fiction. It is generally frowned upon to simulate human brains for eternities without their or their originator’s consent. This is also referred to as a “dick move”.
It’s a nice piece of fiction.
It is generally frowned upon to simulate human brains for eternities without their or their originator’s consent. This is also referred to as a “dick move”.
Consciousness is likely a spectrum, i.e. a rock is less conscious than an amoeba which is less concussion than a fruit fly which (hopefully) is less concussion than @tearearlgraycold ;) To me this...
Consciousness is likely a spectrum, i.e. a rock is less conscious than an amoeba which is less concussion than a fruit fly which (hopefully) is less concussion than @tearearlgraycold ;)
To me this is all both super creepy and utterly fascinating. If this ever develops to encompass human minds it's riddled with ethical pitfalls. Can't ever really turn it off. Is it ethical to speed up the simulation? Is it ethical to slow it down? Might not even be a factor...
I would argue that these pitfalls are relevant long before it is possible to do this with human brains. What makes, say, a parrot's brain less self-aware and less interested in its existence than...
To me this is all both super creepy and utterly fascinating. If this ever develops to encompass human minds it's riddled with ethical pitfalls.
I would argue that these pitfalls are relevant long before it is possible to do this with human brains. What makes, say, a parrot's brain less self-aware and less interested in its existence than a human child's?
I agree. I'd argue that most people are fine with animal cruelty (just looking at the meat industry). Most people would likely object to treating humans that way. This of course doesn't make it...
I agree. I'd argue that most people are fine with animal cruelty (just looking at the meat industry). Most people would likely object to treating humans that way. This of course doesn't make it ethically correct to experiment on the consciousness of parrots, just that it is likely that common sensibilities would be upset if this was being done to human minds.
While I think you're right I think people want some utility (perceived utility) out of it so it depends on what it's used for. And I'm pretty sure that animal testing on cosmetics is down by a...
While I think you're right I think people want some utility (perceived utility) out of it so it depends on what it's used for. And I'm pretty sure that animal testing on cosmetics is down by a buttload, at least in some parts of the world, it has definitely affected legislation.
That said I also think we are very visual when it comes to our relation/dislike of animal cruelty so I'm not sure that there'd be any traction for banning/boycotting pure simulation regardless of if there's actual sentience there on a similar level to the actual animals.
This idea is giving me Cats Cradle vibes, like an invention that ends up dooming us all somehow. I'm not sure how you'd build a whole story on this but I feel like it could be pretty good. Also I...
Now I want to write a sci-fi story (...)
This idea is giving me Cats Cradle vibes, like an invention that ends up dooming us all somehow. I'm not sure how you'd build a whole story on this but I feel like it could be pretty good.
Also I just want to say the idea of the simulated fruit fly is giving me the fucking creeps.
Want to find all the most effective ways to exploit flaws in human psychology? No more painstaking trial-and-error over the course of years, just run simulations at high speed for a few hours/days...
it would be very interesting to test fly human traps on simulated flies humans
Want to find all the most effective ways to exploit flaws in human psychology? No more painstaking trial-and-error over the course of years, just run simulations at high speed for a few hours/days until you see the desired outcome!
Gotta love it when you reincarnate into what you think is a fruit fly expecting a few weeks before you’re back in the queue, and then you’re stuck in a mainframe for god knows how long.
Gotta love it when you reincarnate into what you think is a fruit fly expecting a few weeks before you’re back in the queue, and then you’re stuck in a mainframe for god knows how long.
This is a blogpost by a private company, but in this case most of the research was done while the founder was a researcher at a public university (UC Berkeley, go bears), so you can actually do it...
This is a blogpost by a private company, but in this case most of the research was done while the founder was a researcher at a public university (UC Berkeley, go bears), so you can actually do it yourself if you want. The fruit fly connectrome was created by research at Princeton.
You can download the fruit fly's brain connection data (the connectrome) here: https://codex.flywire.ai/
So in this case, you don't need to trust that they're doing what they're saying, you can attempt to replicate it if you want. According to the paper, the fruit fly's brain is easily able to be run on any modern computer (with only 140k neurons, it's not that complex).
The fruit fly could have never guessed when it was born in a laboratory that it would live forever, in some sense.
This is interesting, and I wonder how accurate the behaviour is. The most interesting thing would be what differences in behaviour exist between this fly and a real fly. Some will be from the...
This is interesting, and I wonder how accurate the behaviour is. The most interesting thing would be what differences in behaviour exist between this fly and a real fly. Some will be from the limitations of the 3D simulation of the environment, but it might suggest what is missing from our understanding of biological computation, e.g. whether astrocytes also contribute, or how large a role dendritic level computations are.
I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or if new tech breakthroughs really are becoming more and more ethically questionable, but there's a disturbing trend of an increasing proportion of...
I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or if new tech breakthroughs really are becoming more and more ethically questionable, but there's a disturbing trend of an increasing proportion of new tech stories laying the groundwork for the torment nexus
Not really sure how to respond to this. I had a whole thing written about the AI character Cortana from the Halo series, who is a clone of a person's brain running on a flash drive, but I guess I...
Eon’s mission is to produce the world’s largest connectome and highest-fidelity brain emulation, targeting a complete digital emulation of a mouse brain and laying the groundwork for eventual human-scale emulation.
Not really sure how to respond to this. I had a whole thing written about the AI character Cortana from the Halo series, who is a clone of a person's brain running on a flash drive, but I guess I don't know what to do with that connection. "Human-scale emulation" is not a phrase that makes me feel good about the future. "Look, we built a functioning human brain!" Okay, and what are you going to do with (to?) that brain sealed inside a computer? What will it be able to do? What will you allow it to do? Is a disembodied brain a mind? I'd lean toward "not quite", but where is the line drawn?
Supposedly we have now taken the fruit fly connectome and put it in a physics simulator. Given the right stimulus, it apparently walks around, grooms its antennae, and drinks virtual fluids.
If this is real, it's amazing.
I personally don't believe insects to be conscious, but we're barreling towards an ethically complicated future. Still, very cool stuff. Without thinking of further iterations, it would be very interesting to test fly traps on simulated flies - rapidly iterating until you have the perfect trap. Or maybe do the same for mosquitos to curb malaria.
Edit: Now I want to write a sci-fi story where someone designs the perfect mosquito trap, hijacking their senses with a device created after billions of simulations with virtual mosquitos. Any mosquito within a couple of meters of it appears to be sucked in like a vacuum, but really they're flying directly at the device through no choice of their own. The appearance, shape, and scent of the object is perfectly tuned to cause your average mosquito to direct themselves into it.
100% we are barreling towards something difficult. “Ethically complicated” is the undersell of the decade.
For some reasons as to why, I implore everyone curious enough to check out this thread in the first place to read https://qntm.org/mmacevedo.
It’s essentially sci-fi horror written as a future Wikipedia-style article.
It’s a nice piece of fiction.
It is generally frowned upon to simulate human brains for eternities without their or their originator’s consent. This is also referred to as a “dick move”.
Consciousness is likely a spectrum, i.e. a rock is less conscious than an amoeba which is less concussion than a fruit fly which (hopefully) is less concussion than @tearearlgraycold ;)
To me this is all both super creepy and utterly fascinating. If this ever develops to encompass human minds it's riddled with ethical pitfalls. Can't ever really turn it off. Is it ethical to speed up the simulation? Is it ethical to slow it down? Might not even be a factor...
I would argue that these pitfalls are relevant long before it is possible to do this with human brains. What makes, say, a parrot's brain less self-aware and less interested in its existence than a human child's?
I agree. I'd argue that most people are fine with animal cruelty (just looking at the meat industry). Most people would likely object to treating humans that way. This of course doesn't make it ethically correct to experiment on the consciousness of parrots, just that it is likely that common sensibilities would be upset if this was being done to human minds.
While I think you're right I think people want some utility (perceived utility) out of it so it depends on what it's used for. And I'm pretty sure that animal testing on cosmetics is down by a buttload, at least in some parts of the world, it has definitely affected legislation.
That said I also think we are very visual when it comes to our relation/dislike of animal cruelty so I'm not sure that there'd be any traction for banning/boycotting pure simulation regardless of if there's actual sentience there on a similar level to the actual animals.
This idea is giving me Cats Cradle vibes, like an invention that ends up dooming us all somehow. I'm not sure how you'd build a whole story on this but I feel like it could be pretty good.
Also I just want to say the idea of the simulated fruit fly is giving me the fucking creeps.
I'll take two!
Want to find all the most effective ways to exploit flaws in human psychology? No more painstaking trial-and-error over the course of years, just run simulations at high speed for a few hours/days until you see the desired outcome!
I was thinking of this and figured one of the maxima would just be a really attractive woman.
Gotta love it when you reincarnate into what you think is a fruit fly expecting a few weeks before you’re back in the queue, and then you’re stuck in a mainframe for god knows how long.
This is a blogpost by a private company, but in this case most of the research was done while the founder was a researcher at a public university (UC Berkeley, go bears), so you can actually do it yourself if you want. The fruit fly connectrome was created by research at Princeton.
You can download the fruit fly's brain connection data (the connectrome) here: https://codex.flywire.ai/
The SNN they created uses the the open source library brian2: https://brian2.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
The nature paper is publicly available without a paywall: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07763-9
So in this case, you don't need to trust that they're doing what they're saying, you can attempt to replicate it if you want. According to the paper, the fruit fly's brain is easily able to be run on any modern computer (with only 140k neurons, it's not that complex).
The fruit fly could have never guessed when it was born in a laboratory that it would live forever, in some sense.
This is interesting, and I wonder how accurate the behaviour is. The most interesting thing would be what differences in behaviour exist between this fly and a real fly. Some will be from the limitations of the 3D simulation of the environment, but it might suggest what is missing from our understanding of biological computation, e.g. whether astrocytes also contribute, or how large a role dendritic level computations are.
I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or if new tech breakthroughs really are becoming more and more ethically questionable, but there's a disturbing trend of an increasing proportion of new tech stories laying the groundwork for the torment nexus
Not really sure how to respond to this. I had a whole thing written about the AI character Cortana from the Halo series, who is a clone of a person's brain running on a flash drive, but I guess I don't know what to do with that connection. "Human-scale emulation" is not a phrase that makes me feel good about the future. "Look, we built a functioning human brain!" Okay, and what are you going to do with (to?) that brain sealed inside a computer? What will it be able to do? What will you allow it to do? Is a disembodied brain a mind? I'd lean toward "not quite", but where is the line drawn?