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.
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.