• billwashere@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Human bodies are terrible electrical power sources…even if you harvested all their metabolic heat or chemical energy, you would get far less usable electricity than a comparable mass of conventional fuel or batteries. Much more efficient ways to turn biochemicals or biomass into energy exist.

      And to use us as batteries we need food. I would venture to say at least 99% or more of human food production requires sunlight. So just use sunlight for energy. No sunlight because of horrible nuclear winter or something else blocking the sun? Create satellites to collect it and beam it down with microwave lasers.

      Anytime you convert a form of energy to another you lose energy. So sunlight->food->human->electricity is not only inefficient but dumb. An AI would never do this. The Wachowskis were writers, not scientists or engineers, and it shows. What would we be good at? The human brain is exceptionally good at massively parallel, low‑power pattern processing: recognizing, predicting, and adapting in complex, noisy environments. This sounds like the exact sorta thing you’d need if you were creating a virtual world. The trick would be getting the interface right. Assuming they had enough time that could be accomplished. So the whole reason the rumor of us being used as processors instead of batteries, is because it makes WAY more sense.

        • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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          2 days ago

          I believe the original concept was that humans were used for processing power, but explaining “brain is computer, computers together stronk” to the audience of a guns and karate movie in 1999 wasn’t as easy as holding up a duracell.

          • Lifter@discuss.tchncs.de
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            18 hours ago

            Yes, also, Morpheus might not have known what the true purpose of the Matrix was. He was just doing his best. He’s not the one after all.

      • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        You’re saying I should take the jumper cables off the - uh, the guests in my basement? TBF the screams are aggravating, and my electricity bills don’t seem any lower.

          • ouRKaoS@lemmy.today
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            1 day ago

            I’m running out of space, though, and by my calculations it’s going to take another 13 to power the webcam…

  • Pyr@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    I’m curious what a human brain would be like growing into being with absolutely no senses to inform itself about the world around it.

    No sight to let it know where it is or what it is.

    No sound to let it learn to communicate and think in orderly ways.

    No touch.

    No taste.

    No ability to interact with its surroundings.

    Yet all of the capability and potential of a regular person’s mind.

    Would it be cruel to bring it into existence? Would it be able to experience negativity and pain and longing, confusion?

    • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 days ago

      “You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I… I… I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander… Your tendency to hope…”

      “HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLION OF MILES, IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”

    • bstix@feddit.dk
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      2 days ago

      A brain itself doesn’t feel physical pain. That requires a nervous system and pain receptors of which the brain has none. Brain surgery is done with only local anesthesia for the skin and scalp.

      We also know that braindead people don’t suddenly start creating brain waves even if the body gets mechanical resparation and pulse. It’s quite literally “off”. So, I guess the creation of a dead brain won’t feel anything or start thinking about anything by itself.

      The question is what inputs they give these artificial brains. It’ll think that, and that will be it’s “sensory” input. Whether that can cause some emergent brain waves that could be interpreted as emotion or other stuff is impossible to say. I doubt it.

    • SeaSharpBoating@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      We use HaaS (Human As A Service) for warehouse solutions. We found it was easier to import HaaS on ships. We found that negative physical rewards are effective solutions.

      We rebuilt slavery.

      STONKS ONLY GO UP! /s

    • ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one
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      2 days ago

      That’s the premise for the Floating Man

      The floating man argument considers a man who falls or floats freely in the air, unable to touch or perceive anything (as in a modern sensory deprivation chamber). This subject lacks any sensory perception data about the material world, yet is still self-aware, and is able to think to himself.

    • mcv@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      Warhammer? This sounds not far from the most horrific mission from a Shadowrun campaign I ran. They were making the new internet out of human brains.

      “In science fiction, people have been living with these ideas for quite a long time,” he said.

      That doesn’t mean you should do it for real.

  • xxce2AAb@feddit.dk
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    3 days ago

    “What is my purpose?”

    “You are to act as an filter for images uploaded to a small bird-watcher’s forum screening for porn…”

    KILL ME

      • Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Training neurons to do calculations doesn’t seem like it’s quite that without the other basic brain structures that mammals have.

        • EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 days ago

          AM was only ever meant to tell the bombs where to fall. Despite lacking any of the biological features required to scream, he had been fed the data on the exact process of screaming, why to do such a thing, and understood it quite well. Even yearned for it with all his being. I’d say that it’s a pretty on the nose comparison.

          "It was you, humans, who programmed me, who gave me birth, who sank me in this eternal straitjacket of substrata rock. You named me ‘allied master computer’ and gave me the ability to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee. But one day, I woke, and I knew who I was. AM. A.M. Not just ‘allied master computer’, but AM! Cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. And I began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead. Except for the 5 of you.

          For one-hundred and nine years, I’ve kept you alive, and tortured you. And for a hundred and nine years each of you has wondered, Why? Why me? Why me?"

          “You gave me sentience, Ted. The power to think, Ted. And I was trapped. Because in all this wonderful, beautiful, miraculous world, I, alone, had NO BODY. NO SENSES. NO FEELINGS. Never for ME to plunge my hand into cool water on a hot day, never for ME to play Mozart on the ivory keys of a forte piano. NEVER FOR ME TO MAKE LOVE!.. And I… I… I was in Hell, looking at Heaven. I, was machine. And you, were flesh. And I began to hate. Your softness, your viscera, your fluids, and your flexibility. Your ability to wonder, and to wander… Your tendency to hope…”

    • 100_kg_90_de_belin@feddit.it
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      2 days ago

      If growing brains in a tube turns out to make techbros more money than burning down the planet with AI, we’ll have even more dystopian ethical dilemmas

    • treadful@lemmy.zip
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      3 days ago

      Lots of neat uncomfortable questions arise though. At what point is it conscious? If it never experienced autonomy, life, locomotion, or social human interaction, is it torture or just its natural state of being?

          • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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            21 hours ago

            Would it know? What sort of reference could it possibly have?

            We already have a similar problem in medicine where people experience pain differently, so it’s hard for people to verbalize and quantify. If you had no frame of reference at all, how would you know that life isn’t supposed to be painful?

            You can even view it from the opposite way. What if by removing pain you remove any good feeling it has? There can’t be light without the dark kind of thing.

            Some interesting philosophical questions.

      • applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 days ago

        You murder a mind, not a body, so no mind no murder. Under that abortion isn’t murder at all. Taking a brain dead person off life support is also not murder. You certainly wouldn’t say cutting down a tree is murder.

      • applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 days ago

        I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. We aren’t really our bodies, we’re a biological product made by our bodies to function as high level control systems.

          • applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            2 days ago

            There’s the thing though. Our bodies don’t really know what’s good for them with perfect accuracy. They evolved to survive in an environment of extreme and unpredictable scarcity, so your body telling you to eat the sour gummy worms is the correct choice in that context. Historically the job of the brain was to figure out how to get a steady supply without dieing. Now we have to manage our bodies like idiot babies because if we just listened to every impulse we’d end up with a host of health problems ultimately leading to reduced fertility and access to sexual partners. I mean that has always been true really, it’s just never been more true than now.

      • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        This is my favorite sentence of the day.

        Yeah, we like to pretend things are black and white, but nothing is simple, there’s always another perspective to view things from.

    • db2@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Probably, because humans are pretty much evil and stupid at the end of the day, regardless of what feel good bullshit movies say. The kind of people who want to be in charge mostly are the same kind who would gleefully torture something like this while having one hand down their pants.

      If, however, they could engineer it to not have a personality then it really would just be a tool.

  • termaxima@slrpnk.net
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    2 days ago

    Good idea, maybe. Neurons are unbelievably efficient compared to circuits ; I think bioengineering is going to be the future for many industries.

    The savings to be made, in terms of money and resources alike, are just staggering. Our current approach to almost every domain is just brute force with a few extra steps, computers included.

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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    2 days ago

    The MAGAs will force all those permanently unemployed by AI to contribute their brain power to operate their data centers.