So true, goodbye EVs... and many other great achievements.

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Well, someone a few years ago used the brain cells of few different lab rats, and made the perfect sim flier.
Then there was that experiment with locust brains and the brakes of a car, it saved the life of a person who willingly put his life on the line to make a great safety system, the company turned it down.
And sometime around the 1970s a guy made a great discovery, pigeons, highly adaptable, can be taught to do about anything. Trivial fact, two pigeons can tell the difference, and discard defective pills, with 99.99% accuracy; they can also find waterlogged bodies in the ocean many times faster than a human. Though they have tiny brains, they can remember many events and pictures for years and react to them accordingly. ( I did read Superdove )

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Around the time of WWII, Germans mantained a disembodied dog head for weeks, and yes, the head could still do all of it's necessary functions, the video made me really disconcerted...

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And on a further note, we aren't greater than any other species on this planet, they are just as developed as them, but we just like to be reliant on the now normal keep or kill behaviors, like keep the pretty, and kill the modest...

99.99% of "living beings" don't even have brains.
I mean, it's still not life, but for other reasons.


Still, ♥♥♥♥ fantastic! I read about the start of this experiment a few years back, or something like it. Scientists trying to make an interface between brain cells and electronics, but when I saw it back then it was with the purpose of transferring information from one format to the other.
Makes you wonder about consciousness a bit. If you could get a person's brain onto a computer, thought for though, all of the memory, everything, that computer would act, think, and respond in exactly the same way that the real person would. But say the original organic brain had to be destroyed in order to perform the procedure. Would that be worth it (for the subject)? Probably not, because you yourself would not get to experience consciousness anymore.

If you're like me and you don't believe in souls or any of that jazz, it kinda makes you think.

It's a huge development! It may not be an improvement on AI ability in the sense you're thinking, but in terms of development of the technology, this is a huge milestone in the hardware that could be necessary for advancement in the field.

Actually, that was the Russians.
Kinda makes me feel like checking some of that other stuff you threw out there, too...

The definition of a living being is (paraphrasing from memory, I may be wrong)

Something that expells waste. (for us, crapping)

Something that grows.

Something that requires nutrition.

Something that can reproduce.

Something that can react to it's surroundings.

It can react, and it has to expel something to work at all, but it can't grow, it can't reproduce and it probably doesn't require nutrition, though I don't know about that.

It's somewhere between living and inanimate, but it's not living.

It's bathed in a nutrient solution, and it can grow. They started the project with a small clump of neurons that grew over the contacts. It can't reproduce though, as you said.

did you not read the article? they fed it nutrients through a tube.

Exactly.
So yeah, the thing as a whole isn't alive. Technically, we still have to say the brain cells are alive, but I mean, okay, yeah, whatever.

The significance of this is not that we created life. That's a whole 'nother front.

Just because it has a living element which they nurtured does not make it life.

Look at it this way: if you put a pig pen in the back of a pickup, have you created life?
No, not really.

It does, by common logic, all living matter needs sustenance, or it'd decay.

So is there a way for the brain cells live without nutrition
And secondly, if it has conscientiousness ( and don't give me that animals have no conscience bs ) , is able to control said entity it has control over, isn't static, it is alive.

Though, consciousness requires that the machine has a sense of self, that it knows that it itself is alive, and there is truly a world around it. However the only sense the robot has is a sonar device.

Its like the robot is a vegetative state... I'm likening the robot to a protozoa.

A living thing to be doesn't have to be flesh. The human body is a advanced machine, we can call ourselves "living" because we think.

The only true ethical thing I see is removing the brain of a organism that has been living for some time, and sticking it into the body of a machine that cannot completely replicate the senses. Though note, we're using brain cells, not the brain itself.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QPiF4-i ... annel_page

But if you modify/train the two so the pig can drive the truck, it is an achievement.
You're right, this isn't creating life, but nonetheless it is manipulating it in an impressive way that may have useful applications when advanced further.

Hey, though it doesn't have our senses, or some senses doesn't mean it is a vegetable, our brains are vegetables in our 'advanced robots'.

Yeah, ethnics have ♥♥♥♥ us over, too many times, but we should follow our endeavors, in the shadows.
Sometimes, the greatest things need to have it's secrets, for example, homing missiles back then, blah blah blah, bio-logical pilot, turned down even though it had undeniably amazing accuracy.

Oh no, yeah, I was arguing before that it is indeed an amazing achievement, just not in the direction some people are hailing it.



You're right, actually - it's less than vegetative.
There are even microscopic organisms with cells that qualify as "brains", you know. The most basic brain detects a chemical presence and tells whatever is in charge of locomotion to either go towards what is sensed or away. That is essentially what they've done with the rat brain, except with a different sensor. Consciousness is much much much more complicated.