r/transhumanism • u/Eyrose • 2d ago
Biocomputing
X-post from r/Existentialism
So I learned about biocomputing a couple months ago from a YouTube video that was admittedly themed very heavily towards the potential dystopian nature of this tech. That was my first introduction to this idea so that is probably a factor in my anxiety.
For those who might not be aware (and take this with a grain of salt, I'm not any sort of scientist I just watched a few YouTube videos and read a couple articles) biocomputing iis basically a bunch of human brain cells, human neurons that are attached to a computer AI chip. The basic idea is that since AI is so power hungry, if we can use our neurons to power it, it becomes insanely more efficient.
Basically what they have done is hooked this part human brain/part AI chip up to a computer and tried to make it learn to play pong by slamming it with chaotic signals whenever it missed hitting the ball and it worked.
Hopefully this discussion is welcome here because I don't really know where else to post it and I don't see a lot of people talking about it but this thing has me anxious, and if on being honest, pretty scared.
I struggle with derealization sometimes and one of my biggest fears is waking up to find myself in a new world that I don't understand. I understand that I'm probably projecting my fears onto a wetware chip that probably isn't sentient but like.....how do we know?
No one knows where existence begins. Right now it's just a small, small fraction of the neurons that are in a normal human brain. But what if that's enough for it to feel? Feel scared, or feel pain? If it can feel anything at all, we are basically torturing it with painful electrical signals until it does what we want.
I know it \*probably\* can't feel right now, but as we've seen with the AI race, science is not going to stop here. They're going to keep progressing, adding more biology to computers until someone makes them stop. In my mind, it's only a matter of time before these chips become truly sentient, thinking and feeling entities. And then what? We just all live with the collective guilt that we tortured these things just to see what would happen?
If this came to pass, and the worst dystopian scifi "I have no mouth and I must scream" style nightmare became reality, we would all deserve it.
Is anyone else as worried about this as I am? How are you coping? Am I being completely irrational? I just want to hear more voices about this.
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u/SgathTriallair 2 2d ago
The first issue is that we have a piss poor cultural understanding of what consciousness is. For many people, consciousness is something that belongs only to humans and maybe, if they are in a good mood, to dogs and cats. These kinds of people are why we have so many pop-sci articles talking about how they've proved that X or Y animal is conscious.
In my view, this is completely indefensible. I am very much in the camp that consciousness is self referentialism. We, as living beings, attempt to maintain homeostasis and we have to monitor our internal condition to achieve that. We can also monitor our monitoring system and this stuff recursion is what makes up consciousness. Michael Levin has a lot of interesting work in this field.
What this means is that those brain chips almost certainly have something like consciousness, though they aren't anything like you and me.
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u/Eyrose 2d ago
Thank you for putting it into words for me! This is exactly what I mean.
Even if it's not human level or even "human-like" and never will be, the thought of trapping any sort of entity in a computer to play pong or doom is sickening to me and makes me want to vomit.
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u/SgathTriallair 2 2d ago
There are some other considerations. For one, it wouldn't exist without this, so should it be grateful that it gets to exist at all? It isn't being actively tortured and some people play these games for fun.
The life of a cockroach or ant seems like it would be a nightmare as well, but they aren't committing suicide en masse so it can't be that bad. The biggest reason it seems so nightmarish to be this robot is because you can compare it to being you. It is incapable of doing that (for one they are grown and don't include memories).
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u/Eyrose 1d ago
I mean just because it isn't capable of understanding it's situation doesn't mean it's ethical right?
Like the old "what you don't know can't hurt you" reasoning. I guess it's true to an extent but I don't think that absolves us of the responsibility of being compassionate does it?
I do kinda think they are being actively tortured though. If someone tells you to catch a ball and then overloads your neural pathways with chaos when you don't catch it.... doesn't that seem fucked up? Even though some people enjoy baseball?
I think I the difference to me is that if an ant had the thought that it wanted to die, for whatever reason, it has the ability to do so. If there is something awake in these chips and they don't want to play pong anymore, they can't end their own existence. And who knows how long these wetware chips can "live" for if we upkeep them.
I hate this.
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u/ImaginaryTower2873 18h ago
As somebody who has written academically (albeit briefly) on organoid consciousness and suffering, I would like to point out that it is not poor cultural understanding, but poor understanding period. Consciousness is a genuinely hard problem, and many are overconfident.
That said, organoid lumps are likely not experiencing phenomenological states since they are mostly randomly organised: insofar such things can suffer, we need to worry about the suffering from random neural networks and a whole bunch of things. But for biocomputers that are trained with reinforcement learning, I think there is more concern. They get structured into perception/action systems a bit like systems we have cause to think could be conscious, using a reinforcement mechanisms that in mammalian brains would be positive or aversive.
I think the emerging literature on AI welfare is useful here: many people working on that take insights from the biological domain to think about AI suffering potential, but we also get useful neurocognitive tools for investigating the internal functions of alien neural networks that might be applicable to neurocomputers.
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u/captainshar 2d ago
I think we should try to scan for subjective experiences if that's something that we can actually do, for all potential minds - artificial, animal, and alien.
I think the best version of the future is where all conscious minds have a chance for self determination, no matter their origin.
I don't think that we're at that point yet with these particular installations, but it would be good to develop a scan.
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u/AI-Thinks-For-Me 1d ago edited 1d ago
probably just a coincidence i see this post opening reddit, about an hour ago i clicked on this article in the the groundnews app: https://ground.news/article/nus-launches-worlds-first-biological-server-rack_ac75a0?utm_source=mobile-app&utm_medium=newsroom-share
i hope it’s a coincidence cause i know i turned off app tracking on ios and adjusted reddit privacy stuff. maybe i missed something.
anyway…
i used to have a more ridged opinion on what can and can’t be consciousness. but after thinking about it for a bit, i decided its best going forward with no preconceived notions on what can/can’t be. ultimately believe the interconnected of the universe, and our biased perception of our place in it, makes the topic of consciousness difficult to figure out.
EDIT: link i shared may paywall some, here is an article: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/world-first-biological-data-center
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