Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

booleandilemma

Future robots will be powered by human brain cells. Companies will use them as conscious slaves and they'll get around slavery laws by saying they're not human.

dustfinger

> We’ve combined lab-grown neurons with silicon chips and made it available to anyone, for first time ever. There is a line somewhere here that I personally feel we should not cross.

kingkawn

Wasn’t this the original conceptualization for the Matrix?

neom

It seems a bit more complicated than first blush: https://www.rdworldonline.com/the-neurons-playing-doom-are-a... Personally, dislike this direction a lot. I don't like that they're using a killing game (I understand the trope, doesn't make me like it any less) and the general idea of this whole thing makes me quite uneasy.

fsmv

I'm having trouble understanding to what extent the machine learning used for interfacing with the neurons is doing the learning

sillysaurusx

Be sure to dig into the details before taking this at face value. There once was a story "Rat brain flies plane" a couple decades ago, and it turned out to be bogus. But to find that out, you had to read the paper and reverse engineer that nothing substantial was actually going on. It's tempting to be charitable, but you can't really know whether headlines like this are legit till you understand exactly what they did. (The rat brain guys repeated the experiment until the plane stopped crashing, but no "learning" was happening; it was expected that when the neuron's range reached so-and-so, that the plane would fly level. So they started with a neuron outside that range, showed that it crashed, then adjusted the neuron until it flew level. But that's not what "rat brain flies plane" implies.)

Frieren

Billions of living human brain cells have played Doom in a number of different devices for a couple of decades now. What would be surprising is for dead human cells to play anything at all.

dlcarrier

I've never understood why they do this research with human neurons when any neurons would do.

lp4v4n

It’s the first time I’ve heard about this company, and of course I haven’t taken the time to check how real their product is, but honestly, for me it’s very difficult to believe we currently have the technology to correctly integrate a living neuron into a chip, let alone compute anything meaningful with it. From what I’ve read elsewhere, our understanding of neurons is still very basic, and we need a lot more fundamental research before reaching results like these. We still don’t even properly know how migraines work, nor can we cure paraplegia, yet somehow we supposedly have the capacity to grow second brains and program them on top of that.

rickcarlino

It is going to be quite the ethical dilemma if/when these machines produce text output comparable to a modern LLM...

bronlund

So the whole reality for this little brain is literally pure hell :D

wonger156

Hard to tell If the neurons actually learned to play doom or if its just the decoder that learned from the neuron responses. The disease modeling for this system is a very cool usecase though.

rolph

there is a reading room of sorts: https://corticallabs.com/research

thezipcreator

what's with people inventing new torment nexuses every few weeks? could you people just chill, please?

dang

(We changed the URL from https://corticallabs.com/doom.html since it points to this)

shevy-java

So THAT's why I can't finish within the scheduled timeline ...

zeronight

The part I can't get past, where would you source live human brain cells? Does anyone have insight into how you would even start to source or grow/create the cells? Also the machines look very organic and clearly have to keep the cells alive. Do they have to change them out every so often?

zeroq

I literally can't wait for this petri dish to learn how to interact with LLMs and start vibe coding JS libraries.

max_

OI just turns out to be straight up unethical, immoral and disgusting for me.

rezonant

But can it run Crysis?