> 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.