If Mother Brain from Metroid is going to be a thing, they should also start using that biocomputing to develop the Power Suit.

We've got to have a societal conversation on what we're going to do when these actually do become people. Let's please not reenact the matrix. We're gonna have to treat synthetic people like people. Or else we're creating a slave race.

Gives a whole new meaning to looking for tits.

If growing brains in a tube turns out to make techbros more money than burning down the planet with AI, we'll have even more dystopian ethical dilemmas

Lots of neat uncomfortable questions arise though. At what point is it conscious? If it never experienced autonomy, life, locomotion, or social human interaction, is it torture or just its natural state of being?

Is abortion murder too? At what point is a clump of cells a human?

Our bodies are literally slavery. I don't think any of my cells have a choice to be here.

Probably, because humans are pretty much evil and stupid at the end of the day, regardless of what feel good bullshit movies say. The kind of people who want to be in charge mostly are the same kind who would gleefully torture something like this while having one hand down their pants.

If, however, they could engineer it to not have a personality then it really would just be a tool.

¿Por qué no los dos?

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

Our flesh is as meaningless as the computer powered brains.

Warhammer? This sounds not far from the most horrific mission from a Shadowrun campaign I ran. They were making the new internet out of human brains.

"In science fiction, people have been living with these ideas for quite a long time," he said.

That doesn't mean you should do it for real.

No shit. Well the Imperium is fascist.

Or Thought Emporium (he plans to grow tiny nerve cells to play doom)

Your banal chattering is unnecessary. Are you able to grasp the importance of my experiments? Begone from my sensory range, lest I have you disassembled for servitor parts

We use HaaS (Human As A Service) for warehouse solutions. We found it was easier to import HaaS on ships. We found that negative physical rewards are effective solutions.

We rebuilt slavery.

STONKS ONLY GO UP! /s

"You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I... I... I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander... Your tendency to hope..."

"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLION OF MILES, IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE."

A brain itself doesn't feel physical pain. That requires a nervous system and pain receptors of which the brain has none. Brain surgery is done with only local anesthesia for the skin and scalp.

We also know that braindead people don't suddenly start creating brain waves even if the body gets mechanical resparation and pulse. It's quite literally "off". So, I guess the creation of a dead brain won't feel anything or start thinking about anything by itself.

The question is what inputs they give these artificial brains. It'll think that, and that will be it's "sensory" input. Whether that can cause some emergent brain waves that could be interpreted as emotion or other stuff is impossible to say. I doubt it.

That’s the premise for the Floating Man

The floating man argument considers a man who falls or floats freely in the air, unable to touch or perceive anything (as in a modern sensory deprivation chamber). This subject lacks any sensory perception data about the material world, yet is still self-aware, and is able to think to himself.

Human bodies are terrible electrical power sources…even if you harvested all their metabolic heat or chemical energy, you would get far less usable electricity than a comparable mass of conventional fuel or batteries. Much more efficient ways to turn biochemicals or biomass into energy exist.

And to use us as batteries we need food. I would venture to say at least 99% or more of human food production requires sunlight. So just use sunlight for energy. No sunlight because of horrible nuclear winter or something else blocking the sun? Create satellites to collect it and beam it down with microwave lasers.

Anytime you convert a form of energy to another you lose energy. So sunlight->food->human->electricity is not only inefficient but dumb. An AI would never do this. The Wachowskis were writers, not scientists or engineers, and it shows. What would we be good at? The human brain is exceptionally good at massively parallel, low‑power pattern processing: recognizing, predicting, and adapting in complex, noisy environments. This sounds like the exact sorta thing you’d need if you were creating a virtual world. The trick would be getting the interface right. Assuming they had enough time that could be accomplished. So the whole reason the rumor of us being used as processors instead of batteries, is because it makes WAY more sense.

Sprinkle a little cocaine right on the grey matter to overclock the device.

Then this videogame sucks hard.

The real trick will be in figuring out some sort of solid state device - probably at least partially (if not predominantly) analog, not digital - that can reliably mimic the behaviors of biological neurons.

The actual breakthrough of AGI isn’t going to occur until we figure out how to do machine learning with analog circuit design. Digital simply does not scale well - what we’re doing now with “AI” using GPUs is simply brute forcing the problem by layering dozens of markov chains on top of each other.

The abortion debate is not something we should be basing anything on, before you know it you'll have to raise these little computers as your children and be charged with murder when they die

You can't make mini brains that way, the republicans get mad.

Only if they make the brains much smaller.

it’s not really a brain, just small clusters of neurons

Ah yes, White Christmas. That episode fucked me up. It's a depiction of hell, straight up. And heaven is depicted similarly in San Junipero - not sure if you have seen that one.

Our Startup uses mini human brains inside of biological bipedal systems to provide frontier performance in our custom internal benchmarks. /s

Explain the joke: We rebuilt humanity with a smaller brain.

What will die is only your flesh. The data will still be processed, your voice, your chats, your forum entries. You will be feeding AI for eternity.