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Comment by noosphr | Hacker News Reader

The biotech coming down the line will make our current culture wars seem like a disagreement between two best friends.

All of the following are nearly possible today:

+ A man implanted with a womb giving birth.

+ A woman stealing genetic material and creating a baby, the gender of the second parent is irrelevant here.

+ A woman wanting an abortion, instead having the fetus removed and placed in an artificial womb under the care of the father.

And one that I was working on:

+ Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.

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> Farm animals grown with their brains shut off, used as compute substrate for biological neural networks, while their biological functions are controlled remotely.

I’m sorry, you were working on what? Where does one learn more about this concept?

>Where does one learn more about this concept?

One does not.

One builds the tools to run the experiments to discover the rules.

The closest are FinalSpark and CorticalLabs, but they both are only using in vitro neurons as the computational substrate.

Neuralink et al. are working in vivo, but they are only doing output and don't have any plans to do input, let alone to actively disrupt normal neural activity and take control of bodily processes.

If you're very interested feel free to drop me a line.

I am one of the co-founder of FinalSpark, I believe biocomputing implies to master in vitro learning, and once you get there it may open new perspectives.

On what time scales?

Short term in vitro learning's been shown in the original CorticalLabs paper (20 min), but the sheer difficulty of keeping neurons alive, working, unstressed, fed and oxygenated in vitro while highly active for more than an hour at a time means that no one's been able to show how that short term learning transfers to long term memory.

Using an organism that already provides all the life support for the neurons means that you can have test runs that last hours to weeks with continuous stimulation.

Your tech is easily modifiable so it can do that since it's based on the Intan RHS chips. Happy to have a chat about it since you're one of the two companies that could potentially pull this off right now.

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