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Comment by MrYellowP | Hacker News Reader

I ... I just don't know.

We put a fly into virtual reality. A fly.

Can we appreciate the fact that humanity has come to a point where dystopian shit like this has become the norm? Oh but of course we can! We do!

But should we really? I mean, come on. This is nuts. There's already farmers putting VR goggles onto cows. Because they give better milk. It's progress alright, but it's nuts.

Completely bonkers, if you ask my british personality fragment. It really isn't that far from putting VR onto everything and everyone simply because people have stopped appreciating actual reality, with actual nature.

A fly!

In virtual reality!

It's unironically amazing!

We're fucked. Seriously. lol

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Forgive me, but this is totally the wrong take.

This research is being done to understand cognition. To connect to the biochemistry and biophysics. To improve our models and begin making bigger leaps.

Even simple systems like drosophila are wildly complicated.

A hundred years of this type of investigation and maybe one day we'll be able to record memories. Transfer consciousness. End death.

This isn't just "fly VR". This is the curiosity of being human. And yet another slow, methodical step towards solving it all.

Humans able to manipulate consciousness the way we do matter and information? Now there's a dystopian take for you...

Willing acceptance of our eventual fate of turning into ash while being born in a generation that has all the capacity for increasing lifespan is what's dystopian.

Thinking intelligent life should continue in its current state of being mostly meat flesh bags until the sun boils our ancestors is dystopian.

Status quo, not trying to be special, not trying to reach for the stars with our limited time. That's not just dystopian, it's Kafkaesque. We may as well be in cockroach bodies waiting for the universe to crush us, because thats what not looking up from the dirt gets us.

Curiosity, wonder, and unbounded dreams are among the best qualities of human life. They transcend our weak and dying bodies and our mortal lifetimes.

There are worse things than dying. If I trusted humans not to immediately do all of them upon achieving the capability to do them, my opinion here might more resemble yours.

I don't see where learning that fruit flies are a lot smarter than most people thought makes us appreciate nature less.

If you want a dystopian take, why not this one instead? Climate change is bad enough already if you just assume the billions of nonhuman animals killed, displaced, and degraded by it are meat robots. How much worse to know instead that they are, consistent with their capabilities, no less learning, thinking, and feeling beings than we are?

The series of movies that are the Matrix Trilogy are chuckling at this news release

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