I think this is the same ethical questions of veganism and our use/abuse of biological systems. This is an excerpt from "The Pig that Wants to be Eaten" by Julian Baggini
> After forty years of vegetarianism, Max Berger was about to sit down to a feast of pork sausages, crispy bacon and pan-fried chicken breast. Max had always missed the taste of meat, but his principles were stronger than his culinary cravings. But now he was able to eat meat with a clear conscience.
> The sausages and bacon had come from a pig called Priscilla he had met the week before. The pig had been genetically engineered to be able to speak and, more importantly, to want to be eaten. Ending up on a human’s table was Priscilla’s lifetime ambition and she woke up on the day of her slaughter with a keen sense of anticipation. She had told all this to Max just before rushing off to the comfortable and humane slaughterhouse. Having heard her story, Max thought it would be disrespectful not to eat her.
> The chicken had come from a genetically modified bird which had been ‘decerebrated’. In other words, it lived the life of a vegetable, with no awareness of self, environment, pain or pleasure. Killing it was therefore no more barbarous than uprooting a carrot.
> Yet as the plate was placed before him, Max felt a twinge of nausea. Was this just a reflex reaction, caused by a lifetime of vegetarianism? Or was it the physical sign of a justifiable psychic distress? Collecting himself, he picked up his knife and fork . . .
> Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams (Pan Books, 1980)
lukasb 21 minutes ago [-]
Anyone who believes AI running on silicon could in principle be conscious has to believe that biological computers are conscious, right? Why aren't those people voicing more concerns?
kuboble 18 minutes ago [-]
If ai running on silicon can be conscious - does it imply that the same calculation done by a human with pen and paper is also conscious?
kuberwastaken 18 minutes ago [-]
same question, I thought a long while before clicking publish contemplating if I were sounding too larp-philosophical but it had been bothering me far too long
2OEH8eoCRo0 9 minutes ago [-]
> Why aren't those people voicing more concerns?
They like money
21 minutes ago [-]
FrustratedMonky 8 minutes ago [-]
"Where do we draw the line?"
There will be no line as long as there is the rush to win the capitalist game.
UNTIL -> The ball of neurons begins outthinking the humans. Probably also fused with some AI augmentation.
It only takes a few percentage points for a Human to outthink a Chimp. This new 'thing' will dominate.
LeCompteSftware 17 minutes ago [-]
An underappreciated source of nonsense in 21st century discourse is people watching YouTube instead of reading things. It doesn't appear this author read anything, preferring to be spooked and misled by a YouTube video.
trained them to play DOOM - honestly better than I do.
Maybe the author really really sucks at DOOM, but I think this is a false embellishment:
>> While the neurons can play the game better than a randomly firing player, they’re not very good. “Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who’s never seen a computer—and in all fairness, they haven’t,” Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs, says in the video. “But they show evidence that they can seek out enemies, they can shoot, they can spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning.” [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-b... ]
To play DOOM, the system feeds visual data to the neurons. For the neurons to react, they have to interpret that data in some way.
This is totally false - not even a misleading metaphor, just plain wrong. The neuronal computer doesn't get any visual information:
>> So how does a petri dish of brain cells play Doom when it doesn’t have any eyes? Or fingers? "We take a snapshot of the game with information like the player’s health and the position of enemies, pass it through a neural network, convert it into numbers, and send the data,” explains Cole. “This is called encoding – essentially turning the game state into signals the neurons can understand. The neurons then fire an output – move left, move right, walk forward, shoot or not shoot – which the system decodes and converts back into actions in the game." [https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/mar/16/petri-dish-bra...]
I am also concerned about neuronal computing. But it doesn't really help anyone to spread childish ghost stories about it.
I really hate YouTube, by the way. My dad used to read newspapers and had interesting ideas. Now he watches a bunch of YouTube and he's a huge idiot. It's not (directly) because of age: nobody is immune to narcotic slop. I had to delete my account when I realized how much of my life and cognition I was wasting. I wish others would do the same.
kuberwastaken 10 minutes ago [-]
I really do suck at DOOM - and I did read the paper about BNNs, so I anticipated how it works, doesn't make it any less interesting [0]
Playing DOOM is playing DOOM - if it's through your keyboard or mouse of progressing through the game states to move forward - hope that makes sense.
The point is that it doesn't really make sense to say they're "seeing" anything. You said
So… are the neurons on that chip seeing?
We all desperately want to say no.
But I can confidently say "no, that's totally childish, the neurons are clearly not seeing anything." And in fact it's not even especially clear that they're "playing DOOM" vs. hitting a biased random number generator in response to carefully preprocessed inputs that come from DOOM. There is a major distinction when the enemy positions are directly piped into the brain.
Again I share the ethical concern about this stuff. But your blog post is quite misleading.
philips 8 minutes ago [-]
I feel that "YouTube makes you an idiot" is a misdiagnosis. And one I hear frequently.
Books can make you an idiot too- I think of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" or "Grit" or any number of pseudo-science best seller books. These books end up capturing the public imagination in big ways too- Grit caused some government policy in the US around when it was popular.
The difference, I suppose, is that YouTube works faster by having many different people presenting the same bad ideas that the algorithm has helped you to buy into.
On the other hand there are amazing and useful YouTube channels that I use all the time like Practical Engineering, Crafsman, Technology Connections, Park Tools, SciShow, Crash Course, and on and on.
FrustratedMonky 2 minutes ago [-]
Exactly.
The Printing Press is good example, one of the first books was on "witch hunting", which panicked people, and lead to a lot of deaths. The first, 'conspiracy theory' to sweep over humans.
Humans are just highly susceptible to manipulation. YouTube is just taking it to next level. Like the difference in eating coca leaves, versus snorting coke.
FrustratedMonky 5 minutes ago [-]
Converting an image to numbers, doesn't automatically scream, this isn't seeing.
The brain does a lot of messaging of the input images that doesn't sound far from just linear algebra.
smitty1e 13 minutes ago [-]
Contrarian take: the Promethian efforts will continue, and asymptotically approach the axis of The Real Thing, until we realize that that Prometheus is a variation on the theme of Sisyphus.
Only in this telling, Sisyphus is rolling his uneven boulder along that asymptotic curve a little further with every iteration toward a smiling Zeus.
Rendered at 18:02:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> After forty years of vegetarianism, Max Berger was about to sit down to a feast of pork sausages, crispy bacon and pan-fried chicken breast. Max had always missed the taste of meat, but his principles were stronger than his culinary cravings. But now he was able to eat meat with a clear conscience.
> The sausages and bacon had come from a pig called Priscilla he had met the week before. The pig had been genetically engineered to be able to speak and, more importantly, to want to be eaten. Ending up on a human’s table was Priscilla’s lifetime ambition and she woke up on the day of her slaughter with a keen sense of anticipation. She had told all this to Max just before rushing off to the comfortable and humane slaughterhouse. Having heard her story, Max thought it would be disrespectful not to eat her.
> The chicken had come from a genetically modified bird which had been ‘decerebrated’. In other words, it lived the life of a vegetable, with no awareness of self, environment, pain or pleasure. Killing it was therefore no more barbarous than uprooting a carrot.
> Yet as the plate was placed before him, Max felt a twinge of nausea. Was this just a reflex reaction, caused by a lifetime of vegetarianism? Or was it the physical sign of a justifiable psychic distress? Collecting himself, he picked up his knife and fork . . .
> Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams (Pan Books, 1980)
They like money
There will be no line as long as there is the rush to win the capitalist game.
UNTIL -> The ball of neurons begins outthinking the humans. Probably also fused with some AI augmentation.
It only takes a few percentage points for a Human to outthink a Chimp. This new 'thing' will dominate.
>> While the neurons can play the game better than a randomly firing player, they’re not very good. “Right now, the cells play a lot like a beginner who’s never seen a computer—and in all fairness, they haven’t,” Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs, says in the video. “But they show evidence that they can seek out enemies, they can shoot, they can spin. And while they die a lot, they are learning.” [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-clump-of-human-b... ]
This is totally false - not even a misleading metaphor, just plain wrong. The neuronal computer doesn't get any visual information:>> So how does a petri dish of brain cells play Doom when it doesn’t have any eyes? Or fingers? "We take a snapshot of the game with information like the player’s health and the position of enemies, pass it through a neural network, convert it into numbers, and send the data,” explains Cole. “This is called encoding – essentially turning the game state into signals the neurons can understand. The neurons then fire an output – move left, move right, walk forward, shoot or not shoot – which the system decodes and converts back into actions in the game." [https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/mar/16/petri-dish-bra...]
I am also concerned about neuronal computing. But it doesn't really help anyone to spread childish ghost stories about it.
I really hate YouTube, by the way. My dad used to read newspapers and had interesting ideas. Now he watches a bunch of YouTube and he's a huge idiot. It's not (directly) because of age: nobody is immune to narcotic slop. I had to delete my account when I realized how much of my life and cognition I was wasting. I wish others would do the same.
Playing DOOM is playing DOOM - if it's through your keyboard or mouse of progressing through the game states to move forward - hope that makes sense.
0 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11632
Again I share the ethical concern about this stuff. But your blog post is quite misleading.
Books can make you an idiot too- I think of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" or "Grit" or any number of pseudo-science best seller books. These books end up capturing the public imagination in big ways too- Grit caused some government policy in the US around when it was popular.
The difference, I suppose, is that YouTube works faster by having many different people presenting the same bad ideas that the algorithm has helped you to buy into.
On the other hand there are amazing and useful YouTube channels that I use all the time like Practical Engineering, Crafsman, Technology Connections, Park Tools, SciShow, Crash Course, and on and on.
The Printing Press is good example, one of the first books was on "witch hunting", which panicked people, and lead to a lot of deaths. The first, 'conspiracy theory' to sweep over humans.
Humans are just highly susceptible to manipulation. YouTube is just taking it to next level. Like the difference in eating coca leaves, versus snorting coke.
The brain does a lot of messaging of the input images that doesn't sound far from just linear algebra.
Only in this telling, Sisyphus is rolling his uneven boulder along that asymptotic curve a little further with every iteration toward a smiling Zeus.