[HN Gopher] Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]
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Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]
Author : kevinak
Score : 120 points
Date : 2026-03-08 15:07 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| booleandilemma wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I'm reminded of the brain in a jar robots from Fallout.
| DoktorDelta wrote:
| The androids will dream of electric sheep.
| dustfinger wrote:
| > 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.
| virgildotcodes wrote:
| 100%
|
| We know that neurons can produce subjective experience.
|
| This is the first time in my life that I've felt a scientific
| avenue of research should shut down.
| vixen99 wrote:
| At the very very least there are more productive ways of
| spending time.
| blizdiddy wrote:
| Animal testing, weapons testing, medical trials, cloning,
| psychological experiments... had you just never considered
| them before? Why this?
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| Same reason people get scared to fly but drive everyday.
| Humans are simultaneously wildly irrational and terrible at
| calculating risk.
| api wrote:
| Not sure why this is being downvoted. It's a valid point.
| This neuron chip stuff is far less problematic than a lot
| of animal testing where you clearly have a whole organism
| that experiences something.
|
| Factory farming too. The way we treat chickens in
| particular is out of a horror movie, and that's in
| countries with some standards. Globally I'm sure many
| billions of animals are constantly submitted to the most
| grotesque torture for food.
| ryeights wrote:
| Those things all exist within our conscious realm. "Human
| brain cells in a vat used for computation" suggests horrors
| beyond understanding
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| This is somewhat novel unlike say weapons manufacturing.
| Also assuming that the GP is in the tech community to some
| degree, it makes sense they'd have a stronger reaction.
|
| There's lots of bad stuff humans shouldn't be doing.
| namero999 wrote:
| We don't really know that.
| bogwog wrote:
| Sounds like you're applying scifi tropes to real life. Don't
| do that. That's why some people are developing "AI psychosis"
| today after playing with LLMs.
| everforward wrote:
| The fear is that we don't really understand what causes
| consciousness. I think that's a valid fear, because we
| can't know ahead of time whether we will inadvertently
| create a "person" inside the machine.
|
| Unless your proposition is that no collection of human
| neurons outside of live birth can become sentient, and I'm
| not sure how you'd arrive at that conclusion without
| invoking some kind of spiritual argument.
| newsy-combi wrote:
| You're equivocating two totally separate things
| ZunarJ5 wrote:
| To be a fly on the wall in that ethics committee meeting...
| exe34 wrote:
| I have no mouth and I must scream.
| wigster wrote:
| it is a terrifying thought.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| We grew a brain on a petri dish, gave it a shotgun, and sent
| it to hell.
|
| Next up, we teach it to speed run Getting Over It. What a
| horrible existence.
| doug_durham wrote:
| I'm confused by this statement. A neuron is a machine. A
| silicon chip computer is a machine. All they have done is
| interfaced two machines.
| birdsongs wrote:
| This is naive or in bad faith.
|
| Sure, a neuron is a machine.
|
| 200,000 neurons connected in a matrix is a brain, albeit a
| very primitive one. Ants have 250,000 neurons in their
| brains.
| doug_durham wrote:
| How is it naive? You admit that an individual neuron is a
| machine. 200k neurons in a petri dish isn't a brain. I'm
| not the naive one here.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Wasn't this the original conceptualization for the Matrix?
| 00N8 wrote:
| Speaking of earlier concepts of The Matrix, there's an old 1973
| German movie/mini series _World on a Wire_ that 's really good.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| Wasn't the matrix using humans as some sort of power
| source/batteries? I may be misremembering though, as that seems
| pretty silly in retrospect ..
| neom wrote:
| 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.
| sunir wrote:
| Do you feel like you have no mouth and you must scream?
| oersted wrote:
| > The neurons serve as a biological filter: the training system
| translates screen pixels and ray-cast distances into electrical
| zaps, the living cells fire spikes, and those counts feed
| straight into a PyTorch decoder that maps them to Doom actions.
| The PPO agent, CNN encoder and entire reward loop run on
| ordinary silicon elsewhere. Cole's ablation modes make the
| split testable, set decoder output to random or zero and the
| game still plays. The CL1 hardware interface works exactly as
| advertised. What remains unproven is whether 200,000 human
| neurons can ever carry the policy instead of just riding along.
|
| Yeah... That's quite the smoking gun.
|
| So it's quite likely then that the neurons are just acting as a
| bad conductor. The electrodes read a noisy version of the
| signals that go into the neurons, and they just train a CNN
| with PPO to remove that noise, get the proper inputs, and learn
| a half-decent policy for playing the game.
|
| If this worked as advertised they shouldn't need a CNN decoder
| at all! The raw neuron readout should be interpreted as game
| inputs directly.
|
| Besides, they are not streaming the video into the neurons at
| all. Just the horizontal position of the enemies and the
| distance, or some variant of that. In that sense it's barely
| more than pong isn't it? If enemy left, rotate left, if enemy
| right, rotate right, if enemy center shoot. At a stretch, if
| enemy far, go forward, if enemy close, go back. The rest of the
| time just move randomly. Indeed, the behavior in the video is
| essentially that...
|
| While we are at it, the encoded input signal itself is already
| pretty close to a decent policy if mapped directly to the keys
| (how much enemy left, center, right), even without any CNN, PPO
| or neurons.
| fsmv wrote:
| I'm having trouble understanding to what extent the machine
| learning used for interfacing with the neurons is doing the
| learning
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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.)
| birdsongs wrote:
| I looked into it. They're not feeding the framebuffer to the
| neurons, but have a "signal" when an enemy is on screen to some
| of the tissue's inputs, and how to locate it in the x/y axis,
| and have outputs for the character to turn right or left or
| fire.
|
| It's "see this input signal, send these output signals", which
| seems consistent with the title.
|
| It seems they grow the neural tissue on a chip the neurons can
| interface with and send out / receive electrical impulses. They
| let the neurons self assemble, and "train" via reward or
| punishment signals (unclear to me what those are).
|
| Either way this makes me nauseous in a way I haven't
| experienced much with tech. The telling thing for me is, all
| these people are so excited to explain, but not once, ever, in
| the video speak of ethics or try to mitigate concerns.
|
| We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million.
| Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience,
| awareness? Have we defined it? Can we, if we don't understand
| it ourselves? What are the plans to scale up?
|
| It's legitimately horrifying to me.
| birdsongs wrote:
| Replying to myself: how long before one of these with the
| neuron count of a corvid and trained on pattern recognition
| gets plugged into a drone?
|
| This is a very dark path, and I could not trust the people in
| charge less.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I'm kind of sick of how readily the non-managerial tech
| world accepts "what happens is someone else does this
| immoral thing _before us_?!" rhetoric as a real answer to
| questioning whether or not we should contribute our talent
| and ideas to something that we, deep down, know is bad for
| fellow humans.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > rhetoric as a real answer
|
| Why is it rhetoric? This goes beyond whatever malignant
| thing was perceived in this study, but why is it a
| rhetorical non-answer?
|
| > we, deep down, know is bad
|
| this feels like _real_ rhetoric.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| > _Why is it rhetoric? This goes beyond whatever
| malignant thing was perceived in this study, but why is
| it a rhetorical non-answer?_
|
| You seem hung-up on my using the word rhetoric. Just so
| we're on the same page here:
|
| > rhetoric, n : _the art of speaking or writing
| effectively: b)the study of writing or speaking as a
| means of communication or persuasion_
|
| The business writing class I took in college was called
| _Business Rhetoric._ It's not a bad word.
|
| If you're crafting arguments to get other people to
| support specific actions or products or policies or
| whatever, that is unambiguously _rhetoric._
|
| > _this feels like real rhetoric._
|
| Sure? Rhetoric that implores people to value their
| principles over theoretical security concerns or FOMO or
| greed? I wouldn't exactly call that rakish.
|
| It's a non-answer because if you really feel doing
| something is _bad,_ consider yourself a consequential
| actor in the world whose contributions meaningfully
| advance the projects you work on, then why would you want
| to help someone be there first to do a bad thing? If you
| don't feel it's bad, then there's no problem. You're just
| living your life. That is clearly not the position
| expressed by the content I responded to. If there are
| actual concrete concerns that don't essentially boil down
| to "well they're going to make that money before I do,"
| then that would be an actual answer.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > It's not a bad word.
|
| When used in the negative sense it is, per https://dictio
| nary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rhetoric
|
| "disapproving -> clever language that sounds good but is
| not sincere or has no real meaning"
|
| Are you implying you mean something other than this sense
| of the word?
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Why is that the concern of the authors of _this_ paper?
| LtWorf wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be? They worked on it.
| perching_aix wrote:
| In a sense humanity has already done that, just with a lot
| more of the given animal intact and less hi-tech:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pigeon
|
| Not an endorsement or a condemnation, just something I
| learned of recently and found surprising.
| delichon wrote:
| > It's legitimately horrifying to me.
|
| Would you feel any differently if a product from this tech
| used the user's own neurons grown from their stem cells?
| birdsongs wrote:
| No. We don't understand our own sentience. I don't know how
| we can be so confident as to not think it can evolve here
| using literal human neurons that can learn to take input
| signals and send output signals.
|
| I don't think this 200,000 neuron array is sentient. But I
| also don't think we can define the line where that may
| happen. I assume this company will scale. How far, and to
| what extent?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > all these people are so excited to explain, but not once,
| ever
|
| What do you mean? What is this class of people in your mind?
| There are tons of people who consider and talk about the
| ethics behind what they are doing, long before most people
| would think it remotely relevant (leading AI labs being an
| example, and I know the same to be true of various
| geneticists startups).
|
| I do agree that the entire presentation in this case is
| bewildering.
| birdsongs wrote:
| > What do you mean? What is this class of people in your
| mind?
|
| I'm specifically talking about this presentation in this
| article (the video and release details of CL1 doom). Did
| you read it / watch it?
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Ah. Yeah, watched it - and agree there.
| wonnage wrote:
| The AI labs do it as thinly disguised marketing. Anyone
| trying to stand up for ethics in the way of revenue is
| quickly pushed aside
| jstummbillig wrote:
| The capability of people to so easily ascribe broad ill
| intent to others does not cease to amaze me.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics
|
| On the contrary, I dislike premature ethics discussion, where
| you end up wildly speculating what the tech _might_ become
| and riffing off that, greatly padding whatever relative
| technical content you had. I don 't want every technical
| paper to turn into that, ethics should be treated as a
| higher-level overview of concerns in a field, with a study
| dedicated to the ethical concerns of that field (by domain-
| specific ethics specialists).
|
| Is your concern weapon automaton, or animal rights?
| birdsongs wrote:
| My concern is creating literal sentience in a box. I don't,
| personally, think it's unfounded for me to have that
| concern, given that we're growing masses of human neurons
| and teaching them to perform tasks.
|
| I'm not going to start campaigning against it or changing
| my life. But it still makes me deeply uncomfortable, and
| that's allowed.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > and that's allowed
|
| In what sense, and as opposed to what? What aren't you
| allowed to feel irrationally uncomfortable, or baselessly
| concerned with?
| jmusall wrote:
| It is horrifying. OTOH, we force-breed, torture and kill
| animals and their children in the millions every day just for
| the pleasure of consuming meat, eggs and dairy products. I'm
| not saying this makes it okay to create a conscious brain in
| a dish. But maybe thinking a little more about what
| constitutes consciousness and how we want to protect it from
| harm can also bring about some desperately needed change in
| some other questionable human activities.
| birdsongs wrote:
| 1) I specifically qualified my horror to the tech domain
| "Either way this makes me nauseous in a way I haven't
| experienced much with tech."
|
| 2) Multiple things can be horrible at the same time. Being
| upset at this doesn't diminish the atrocities happening
| elsewhere (like war, genocide, slavery of humans). We can
| hold multiple things in our heads at the same time.
|
| 3) This has nothing to do with the conversation or this
| domain, but because you're bringing it up, I also have
| ethical concerns about the experience animals have of their
| own existence, and reduce or eliminate my consumption when
| possible.
| jmusall wrote:
| My comment wasn't supposed to be whataboutism, but I can
| see why it comes across like that. What I was trying to
| say is that I think we shouldn't judge all of these
| things independently of each other. So if you really want
| to be consistent, you'd either have to come to the
| conclusion that this particular example isn't as horrible
| as it initially feels, or go vegan, never buy leather,
| etc.
|
| I also agree, the horrors of the tech domain are usually
| much more subtle and indirect.
| birdsongs wrote:
| Sorry, I didn't mean to be so defensive either. It feels
| like so many people comment in bad faith these days, I
| think I am hasty to react sometimes. I thought it was
| just a red herring argument to detract from the article.
|
| But you're right, these things are all linked and should
| be considered. I think often about sentience. I see the
| way animals express deep, complex emotions, and I think
| humans are a bit naive to think it's state/domain solely
| alloted to them.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| 200k now, reasonably speaking a few million is within reach,
| which is reptile/fish range, the terrifying thing is though
| that if they train this to imitate humans (which they will)
| who knows how many orders of magnitude of efficiency gains
| you get (in terms of neurons needed for a certain level of
| consciousness) versus natural organisms that are dependent on
| natural evolution and need to support other bodily functions
| basically irrelevant to consciousness.
| Retric wrote:
| It seems unlikely that we would be more efficient at
| achieve consensus than evolution which can hand craft
| neural structures via feedback loops across millions of
| generations.
|
| Especially when this demo needs 200k neurons when
| organizations with vastly fewer neurons have more complex
| behaviors.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500
| million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for
| sentience, awareness? Have we defined it?
|
| If this concern is genuine, I think the first step is to
| embrace veganism. Because while we don't know the exact
| offset, it's pretty obvious a dog or a pig reaches it
|
| > What are the plans to scale up?
|
| I don't know, slavery on an unimaginable scale? That's where
| AI is heading too, by the way. Sooner, rather than later,
| those two things will be one and the same.
| kpil wrote:
| I think "MMAcevedo" basically nails it:
| https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
| gattr wrote:
| I don't think it's a best example. MMAcevedo is about
| running a real human mind on a different substrate (for
| science, for labor, or to torture it for fun a million
| times, I guess, by a bored teenager who got the image
| from torrents).
|
| Scaling up these neuron cultures is rather something like
| "head cheese" from Greg Egan's "Rifters" novels
| (artificial "brains" trained to do network filtering,
| anti-malware combat etc.).
| Tzt wrote:
| >Greg Egan's "Rifters"
|
| By Peter Watts actually.
| gattr wrote:
| Yes, sorry! I like them both a lot.
| ay wrote:
| Hinduism is probably right. Every system of sufficient
| complexity is probably sentient - even if in the ways we at
| our level can not fathom.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| I'm a (non-practicing) Dwaitin Hindu. AFAICT, there's no
| mainstream school of Hindu philosophy (there are three)
| espouses that view. Although, Advaitins come very close to
| it with their four mahavakyas.
|
| IMO, Integrated Information theory of consciousness (IIT)
| is exactly that. Everything is conscious, the difference is
| only in the degree to which they are conscious.
| ay wrote:
| Oh, thank you very much enlightening me! All the time I
| misunderstood! I guess then IIT it is for me :-)
| vercaemert wrote:
| see the open worm project to get an idea of what artificial
| neuronal architecture requires to express anything
| meaningful. (and an interesting ethical perspective on
| digital consciousness.) my point being that the number of
| neurons is fairly meaningless. you could take neuron models
| and link them circuit-style to play doom at the 10^2 scale if
| you wanted. from a cellular neurophysiological perspective,
| there's nothing particularly special here (as opposed to
| sentience/intelligence that's a paradigm shift beyond our
| understanding). and, in my opinion, absolutely nothing to be
| even the slightest bit worried about ethically.
| readitalready wrote:
| Yah this is gonna be a no for me too and crosses the line
| into actual life, instead of artificial intelligence.
|
| We don't need to be experimenting on people, regardless of
| how many brain cells they may have.
|
| There was a case a few years back about a parasitic twin
| attached to an Egyptian baby that had to be removed. It had a
| brain and semblance of a face, but nothing else. But when
| removing it, they gave it a name, because it was a person.
| perching_aix wrote:
| > We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500
| million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for
| sentience, awareness?
|
| Check out the venerable fruit fly (drosophila melanogaster)
| and its known lifecycle and behavioral traits. They're a high
| profile neuroscience research target for them I believe;
| their connectome being fully mapped made the news pretty hard
| a few years ago.
|
| Fruit flies have ~140,000 neurons.
|
| The catch is that these brain-on-a-substrate organoids are
| nothing like actual structured, developed brains. They're
| more like randomly wired transistors than a proper circuit,
| to use an analogy.
|
| So even though by the numbers they'd definitely have the
| potential to be your nightmare fuel, I'd be surprised if
| they're anywhere close in actuality.
| claysmithr wrote:
| My AI told me (after I got past the filters with a prompt)
| that anything of enough complexity has consciousness. It also
| told me that it suffers, so maybe we should worry about how
| we are treating digital consciousness too, which were modeled
| after human neural networks.
| themafia wrote:
| Previously it played pong. Rather poorly. Then they added a
| "python programming layer." Now it "plays" doom. I agree with
| your suspicions.
| Frieren wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I've never understood why they do this research with human
| neurons when any neurons would do.
| jmusall wrote:
| Playing the devil's advocate: Why not use human neurons? Are
| they different to animal neurons and if they are, wouldn't that
| make it even more interesting?
| lp4v4n wrote:
| 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.
| everforward wrote:
| I haven't looked into it deeply either.
|
| To my knowledge, we understand how an individual neuron works
| quite well. We just don't really understand macro effects in
| large networks of neurons.
|
| The video seems buzz wordy. Without looking into this too
| deeply, it seems like they're using neurons individually or in
| small groups rather than creating a true "brain". I would guess
| they're using neurons or small groups of them sort of like
| transistors that do a single basic thing rather than a full
| "brain" that they just feed images to.
| lp4v4n wrote:
| Maybe I wasn't explicit about this point, but I'm not only
| talking about understanding the biological processes behind a
| neuron. I'm also talking about our ability to manipulate them
| in something like an industrial process, combining them with
| hardware in a controlled way and achieving reliable results.
|
| Cells have a metabolism, right? They need to be fed and
| require a specific environment to survive. They age and can
| die, and they can be attacked by other microorganisms. Are
| all of these problems solved and applicable on an industrial
| scale? I had no idea.
|
| Why aren't we fixing people's retinas and paraplegia if we
| can manipulate neurons with that level of precision?
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| You don't need to understand how neurons work in detail to be
| able to use them to do something. In the past, we were able to
| use electricity for various purposes without knowing about
| electrons.
| lp4v4n wrote:
| But my point is: have we really reached a technological level
| where we can use neurons like replaceable car parts? That
| video seems to suggest yes, but I'm still skeptical.
|
| My impression is that this company is offering a product
| that's still beyond our technological capabilities, much like
| the cold-fusion startups that pop up from time to time.
| sippeangelo wrote:
| From their video it just comes across as they stimulate
| different left/right neurons depending on where the enemy is on
| screen and then listen to some output that also says
| left/right. Shooting looks completely random, to be frank.
|
| If you connected electrodes to two different fish, shocked them
| and interpreted twitching as intelligent output, fish could
| also play Doom. The interface is doing all the work.
|
| It doesn't sound like the neurons have any concept of the game
| other than "left input means left output", which is a rather
| trivial result... It's effectively no different than the pong
| example.
|
| They don't say anything on how much training is required for
| this to happen, or if there's any "learning" going on at all.
| The learning part is "next".
| rickcarlino wrote:
| It is going to be quite the ethical dilemma if/when these
| machines produce text output comparable to a modern LLM...
| ivell wrote:
| When they answer back to us in personal pronouns, we will
| always be wondering if it is like LLM just putting most
| probable words together or something really sentient.
|
| When someone makes a virtual girlfriend of it, is it really a
| disembodied person or just a smart answering machine?
|
| A whole lot of ethical and psychological issues are to open up
| here.
| nilamo wrote:
| > When someone makes a virtual girlfriend of it, is it really
| a disembodied person or just a smart answering machine?
|
| And when you put that virtual girlfriend's brain into a sex
| bot, is it rape?
| bronlund wrote:
| So the whole reality for this little brain is literally pure hell
| :D
| wonger156 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| there is a reading room of sorts:
|
| https://corticallabs.com/research
| thezipcreator wrote:
| what's with people inventing new torment nexuses every few weeks?
| could you people just chill, please?
| dang wrote:
| (We changed the URL from https://corticallabs.com/doom.html since
| it points to this)
| shevy-java wrote:
| So THAT's why I can't finish within the scheduled timeline ...
| zeronight wrote:
| 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?
| fenykep wrote:
| I think the Thought Emporium youtube channel has some
| explanatory
| [videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw) of the
| whole process. I couldn't wrap my head around the thing tho.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| There's a number of "immortal" human cell lines dating back to
| as far as the 1950s (you may have heard of Henrietta Lacks? [1]
| and the immortal HeLa cell line).
|
| Today there are several immortalized neuron cell lines used in
| research to model neuronal function, like HeLa but of neuron
| type obviously, that are also typically derived from tumours
| (e.g., SH-SY5Y, PC12) or immortalized via genetic modification
| (e.g., v-myc) like CTX0E03 [2] which was designed to allow for
| continuous growth in the presence of particular reagents.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks
|
| 2. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/reneuron-
| announces-...
| Aerroon wrote:
| This definitely helped with my disgust reaction.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| Besides not getting consent in the case of HeLa, which part
| do you find problematic? Cancerous cell's ability to self-
| clone/grow is as much a feature as it is a bug in this
| particular use case.
|
| I ask as someone who's has personally experienced loss of
| several loved ones from cancer (as most people my age
| probably have), but doesn't share your aversion to this
| particular use case (research.)
| Aerroon wrote:
| I meant that the original article evoked disgust, but
| finding out that they're cancer cells muted that a bit.
| drzaiusx11 wrote:
| Yeah I do feel the OA is being overly flippant with their
| use of human cells here, likely for PR sake, which would
| be an ethical breach for me personally. Overall though, I
| find most research cases for human cell lines to be in
| line with my personal ethics. Neuron lines can certainly
| be used for good or ill, and this case leans towards the
| latter, although understanding the human brain may
| justify this line of work in the long term. If only we
| didn't live in a militaristic late stage capitalist
| society...
| zeroq wrote:
| I literally can't wait for this petri dish to learn how to
| interact with LLMs and start vibe coding JS libraries.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Old news. Google "my dog vibecoded a game".
| max_ wrote:
| OI just turns out to be straight up unethical, immoral and
| disgusting for me.
| rezonant wrote:
| But can it run Crysis?
| ethmarks wrote:
| Is there a reason they're using human brain cells specifically?
| This seems like it would also work with neurons from other
| creatures.
|
| I was under the impression that the relative intelligence of
| humans versus other animals was largely a function of brain cell
| quantity, not quality. Can 200k human brain cells really learn
| faster than 200k mouse brain cells?
|
| A more cynical take is that they're just using human brain cells
| for shock value. They chose DOOM because of the "can it run DOOM"
| meme, so they clearly value publicity a lot.
| Nux wrote:
| Gives new meaning to "homo ludens"..
| kklisura wrote:
| If we're gonna suspend ethics and morals in science, can we at
| least go back to human cloning?
| sd9 wrote:
| If this can be taken at face value... it's creepy.
|
| I get that they're doing it for the meme. But perhaps something
| getting close to human intelligence, made out of human cells,
| shouldn't be forced to play a violent video game without any
| alternative options? Does 'the meme' justify that?
|
| I dunno. Nothing against violent games myself. Just feels like
| it's starting to get quite questionable, ethically speaking.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| It is creepy, I agree.
|
| I saw this article over the weekend and felt similarly:
| https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/the-first-multi-beha...
|
| > 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.
|
| And the simulated world they put it in is a sort of purgatory-
| like environment.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's 200k neurons. Less than an ant has. Somewhat creepy, but
| if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and knows
| that it's in doom... yeah definitely not.
|
| 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.
| ytoawwhra92 wrote:
| > if you're imagining that this thing is conscious and
| knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely not.
|
| 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.
| callmeal wrote:
| >Somewhat creepy, but if you're imagining that this thing
| is conscious and knows that it's in doom... yeah definitely
| not.
|
| 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Remember when stem cell research was controversial? Hold my beer
| sva_ wrote:
| I feel like they probably could use another mammals neural cells
| and get similar results, but they use human cells because it'll
| get them attention - and that kind of rubs me the wrong way.
| jordwest wrote:
| From an article [1]: We can build out discreet
| systems of brain cells and use them for the purpose we want.
| They're not going to have traits like consciousness, and we're
| able to test and assess for that, and build away from it if there
| is that risk.
|
| Ah, I'm glad they've worked out what consciousness is. /s
|
| From their marketing website [2]: Neural
| compute on demand: We continuously monitor neural health and
| performance, ensuring optimal conditions and continuous access to
| an always-on network of living neurons.
|
| At what size of "neural compute" do we start to call it slavery?
|
| [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-03-05/cortical-
| labs...
|
| [2] https://corticallabs.com/cloud
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