Still I don't understand why they would invite the extra creepy factor of using human brain cells rather than e.g. mouse brain cells. Surely it makes no difference biologically but it's going to lead to fewer comments like this.
I'm not imagining that (although one assumes their plan is to scale this up), but nonetheless there's something troubling to me about taking any living thing and wiring its senses up to a profoundly incomplete simulacrum of reality.
Of course we (as a species) have a long history of doing horrible things to living creatures in the name of science and progress.
These stories evoke a different feeling for me, though.
How do we communicate this to the engineers at YouTube who refuse to make an offramp for children from the infinite baby shark AI video loop?
Actually I have a thought which I'd like to share. Why don't we upload good quality/human-curated children media to archive.org and create a more human curated platform instead of shark AI video and we can upload videos for free on archive.org right now. The issue seems to be the more human filter which seems to be the issue.
Sharing this because Youtube Kids is absolutely not safe for kids and youtube is turning a blind eye to all of this because of their monopoly and also (profit? from having children watch a single thing on loop for so long)
Also a minor reason why I don't trust corporations which say protect the kids or governments when they can try to regulate a public company like youtube much easier than trying to control every device but it feels like surveillance goals more than anything to me.
I had watched some video on rabbithole/ "horrors on YT kids" video[0] sometime ago and I rewatched it again and there are even things like Animal Ai Abuse and so so much more vile things being shown to YT kids.
There are comments on that video like: "My 7 year old younger brother came up to me asking if you can drink chlorine. I asked him where he heard this and he told me that he was watching a lego building video on youtube KIDS, where suddenly mid video they started saying stuff like this."
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3PtN-CmybE&t=64s (Caution: The thumbnail is terrifying/horrifying and in general the video is not-safe-for-work while showing things are available on YT Kids so just take that into account on how horrifying the thumbnail/videos in YT kids can be)
I don't know about ants, but after a refresher on the people favorite fruit fly, I'd be hard pressed to be so dismissive - 200K seems to be plenty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302051
I inspire you to look up what is known about fruit flies' behavior.
The reason it's probably nevertheless not as messed up as people might assume it to be is specifically because it's an organoid, not an actual brain. Which is to say, it has the numbers but not the performance, not by a long shot.
> Surely it makes no difference
It absolutely should, though specifically with organoids, I guess it might not. Ironically, I would expect the ethics angle to be actually worse with small animals. The size of the organoid will be closer to the real thing comparatively, after all, so more chances of it gaining whatever level of sentience the actual organism has.
But then this will be heavily muddled by what people believe consciousness is and whether or how humans are special, I suppose.
Yeah but people have no problems experimenting on actual fully working mice already.
* They kinda do have a problem with that too, that's why ethics committees exist, and why the term "animal testing" pops up in the news cycle every so often.
And brains are pretty complicated in how they're arranged. A large portion of the brain basically serves as an operating system of sorts, just managing breathing, moving, detecting smells, producing language, decoding language, etc. Cut all of that out and we're left with thinking and emotions.
If you have a small number (200k is tiny) you aren't going to achieve consciousness.
I don't know if it knows it's in doom - looks like all it knows is to shoot when startled. More than creepy imo.
I've never heard the word qualia used as a synonym for consciousness, only as a related but distinct concept.
> an ant has a greater qualia level than us
What? where does this come from?
They're saying that since we don't know how to "measure consciousness" we can't be certain that an ant doesn't have more "consciousness" than us. Obviously it seems very unlikely, but we can't be certain