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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

We should stop doing things like this.

Stop experimenting on in vitro biological systems of cultured brain cells? Why?

Yes, what possible moral problems could there be from using the one substance in the universe that we know produces sentience to build machines to play Pong?

A lawsuit by Nolan Bushnell, with the settlement to be paid in quarters.

Because eventually you have Blade Runner.

Why?

said every luddite for the last 10 thousand years.

I don't think the Luddite philosophy applies in this case, I think OP may have been speaking about the morality or ethics of growing a brain in a dish? Luddism is more about when the capitalist class steals worker productivity gains for themselves, and is a pretty valid philosophy for today, when the capitalists are trying to replace thinking humans wholesale with computer AI.

How many brain cells do you string together before the DishBrain gets some semblance of sentience? How many before it becomes conscious?

We don’t know, of course. Perhaps consciousness isn’t possible without a live body. Or perhaps it takes just a few hundred thousand neurons.

In the meantime, you run the risk of torturing a potentially conscious entity for…what gain exactly?

It’s just repeating statistical patterns in its input-output mapping.

TIL what a luddite is: apparently they started in 1811 and were named after Ned Ludd, a textile worker in England. So what was the characteristic called in 1810?

According to who you're replying to, they're actually 10,000 years old, and complain about scientific research, rather than about being pushed out of their textile jobs by machinery.

excuse me while I roll my eyes directly into the back of my head. Would you prefer I used the correct Sanskrit term?

Maybe the concept is not much older than that. Luddite implies resistance to technological change and the disruptive consequences of those changes. Before the early modern era, you might go your whole life never encountering/seeing/being replaced by a disruptive new technology. If you've never experienced repeated new changes of that sort you could hardly develop a dislike for them.

Really good point!

Properly they complained about who had control and would get the benefits of the new tech.

In earlier times, the ownership came out differently

That's what she said :)

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