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dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
4ish orders of magnitude’s between fly neuron counts and a human’s. Not to mention mammals tend to have more synapses per neuron than invertebrates.
So I’d say, no humans are not next.
Probably easiest to go to fish next for simplicity, but with the prevalence of mice in neural studies, maybe we’ll skip fish and move right on to mice.
Then to some primate(s), maybe working our way up through several species.
Then humans.
Seth Brundle would be a good intermediate.
Say a server is an order of magnitude faster(it probably isn't you can put an i9 in a laptop). A rack is two orders, 10 racks, 100 racks for a human ballpark if this scaled and it doesn't.
The laptop, was it a ThinkPad?
Why did I read this in Christopher Walken's voice?
he was gay, gary cooper?
Shiu put his in silico fly brain to the test by simulating the activation of neurons that sense sugar or water. The model predicted that specific neurons would fire to extend the fly’s proboscis and initiate eating — a result he and his colleagues showed is true in real adult flies. When simulating activation of sensory neurons from the fly’s antennae, the model predicted the firing of neurons in the circuit involving grooming with the legs, exactly the behavior a fly exhibits when it gets dirt on its antennae.
That is impressive.
How does this deal with learning?
Getting a sense of the scale:
139,255 neurons and 50 million connections [...] 10 year effort [...] It was assembled from 7,000 thin slices through a female adult fly’s brain, imaged with electron microscopy and annotated by AI to identify neuron types and connections.
Compared to house mouse at 71M and human at 8.6×10^10.
I said it in another thread and I'll say it in this one.
Holy. Shit. The terror. The unknowable terror. Is digital-fly conscious? Have we any way of knowing?
We've already been at this point, with these questions.
https://openworm.org/ you can run your own simulated worm buddy! With complete nervous system/connectome and muscle cells
Warning: You can't download the whole virtual worm, we're not quite there yet! :)
You lied to me.
Yeah, I believe so far they have all of the neurons and muscle cells and have modelled the motor behavior, so the worm will wriggle and crawl around. I don't think they have yet simulated other biological processes. But the full "brain" is implemented and running.
There's also this which is a complete worm "brain" but even more simple motor behavior, that runs in your browser. https://heyseth.github.io/worm-sim/
I feel like this will rapidly become a question of definitions. What is consciousness? Is a real fly conscious?
questions that have been asked for thousands of years, actually. heck “cogito ergo sum” and all of that.
So you’re telling me those are not just someone’s booty cheeks viewed from the back?
No, probably a slightly more complex animal, like a gecko. Then a bird or rodent. Then a dog, then a chimp, then finally a human.
Oh, goodie. Now that we have AGI, maybe we can upgrade from ChatGPT to chatting with a digital fly brain. Guarantee it will be less sycophantic at least.
It would’ve been nice for them to scale up the simulations. I liked thinking human brains are far more complex than a fly brain.
Maybe they can then give the simulated human brains to the Powers That Be so they can start making smart decisions.