alt Hacker NewsLiving human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]
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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.
I literally can't wait for this petri dish to learn how to interact with LLMs and start vibe coding JS libraries.
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.
So just a couple functioning braincells and playing doom all day. Me in 9th grade.
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.
The anime Psycho-Pass comes to mind.
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.)
So the whole reality for this little brain is literally pure hell :D
I've searched and can't find a technical paper on this. Has one been released? This is very problematic.
I'm having trouble understanding to what extent the machine learning used for interfacing with the neurons is doing the learning
what's with people inventing new torment nexuses every few weeks? could you people just chill, please?
This sounded strange to me when I heard about embryonic research on this back in 2015, which even started the legal paving in this regard.
Me? I didn't like the idea (then or now), but it would be demagogic to try to fight against it, with so much wrong already existing. The difference between a neuron and a nanostructure is merely the embedded technology.
Back in the 50s and 60s, guided rockets used pigeons. Laika in space. Chimpanzees in orbit. Let's accept that we will have bio-drones and Jonny-Mneumonic style upload interfaces.
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.
> 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.
Hot take here, but I think the version of this experiment that used rat neurons instead of human neurons was more interesting. I can't look for the link right now but there's a video on Youtube, the equipment and techniques are fairly similar.
We know a human can play Doom, so it kind of makes sense a portion of a human brain can do so in some fashion. But it's way more interesting when an animal that normally doesn't play Doom can, specially if it's just a portion of its brain.
Outside of that, I'm personally not very fond of hardware that can rot or die from malnutrition though. It's fun as an experiment, but as a thing you can actually use I just don't see it. It has a literal limited lifespan, requires more maintenance and imagine trying to debug it ("Turns out it caught some bacteria and it's malfunctioning" kinda scenarios? No thanks.)
Could this be the solution for AGI? Real (albeit lab-grown) human brain cells packaged as "chips"?
For those of you taken aback by this and perhaps seeking out some theoretical context this may be useful as a primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_computer
Was surprised to see no mention of wetware in the comments.
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?
So we get the technology to put living brain cells in a virtual simulation, and the first thing we do is put them in hell?
Classic humans.
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.
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.
It is going to be quite the ethical dilemma if/when these machines produce text output comparable to a modern LLM...
They built Warhammer 40k servitors
I've never understood why they do this research with human neurons when any neurons would do.
(We changed the URL from https://corticallabs.com/doom.html since it points to this)
Gives new meaning to "homo ludens"..
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.
We already replicated Terminator.
Why not tackle Robocop next!
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.
there is a reading room of sorts:
There are a lot of things converging right now. Human brain cell computers. Neuralink Mapping of the fly brain and inserting it into a simulation? Ai
We are potentially moving in the direction of uploading conciousness.
OI just turns out to be straight up unethical, immoral and disgusting for me.
So THAT's why I can't finish within the scheduled timeline ...
If we're gonna suspend ethics and morals in science, can we at least go back to human cloning?
But can it run Crysis?
Wasn’t this the original conceptualization for the Matrix?
Remember when stem cell research was controversial? Hold my beer
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.
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.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-03-05/cortical-labs...
I am so proud to be an Australian technologist today.