Google mapped the brain and nervous system of a fruit fly, and modders forced it to play Doom
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/after-google-mapped-an-adult-male-fruit-flys-brain-software-engineers-made-it-play-doom-mario64-and-beat-saber/Open linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com
54 replies
Highly relevant: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
Worth a read, because it’s 100% accurate
Holy shit
Nice. We uploaded a mind into a computer and the first thing we did was put it in a simulation of Hell and teach it how to shoot things.
wonder what would happen if doom took that into the plot... doomguy discovers, hell is not real, it's just a simulation of hell. and he's just been a fly forced to play.
I would try that brain dance
I think the Minecraft modders got there first. That would push doom to 3rd at least.
Humans are nothing if not predictable.
Hell is other flies.
I remember when I first watched Black Mirror White Christmas and the profound existential dread I felt... poor fly... you are just the first.
Can't wait for copies of my brain to be tortured eternally by Grok
Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us. Because at that moment I think I realized completely, so that I was able to verbalize it: Grok was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were helpless. It also became hideously clear: If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was Grok.
I Have a CG Mouth and I Must Scream
This reminds me it's time for an Animatrix rewatch :)
Why wait, go to twitter and get tortured right now!
In case you find yourself fighting mechahitler, you know what's going on.
https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
I mean, at least you're safe.
Your mind clone, however...
How could I tell I'm not the mind clone, though? What if what we consider to be the past is just data we were fed, and the reason we have so many gaps in memory is because they only fed enough to result in the personality they wanted while real humans remember everything they went through, and the reason our memory is so unreliable is because it was stored as text to save storage, and every time we try to access it, the images are recreated through generative models and discarded afterwards, always rendering a slightly different result?
does that mean you can place a fruit fly in a mech and tell it to shoot people?
Somehow we've invented brain uploading but we forgotten to invent the mech
Yes, but in fairness you could do that before.
Yes. Yes we could, but we didn't know that we could, atleast not efficiently. Now we know.
I have no wings and I must fly.
They noticed the fly brain was doing better than any player ever had. Then it started modding. And trying new things. And it was only after it was too late they realized the fly was trying to find a way out. And succeeded.
The fruit fly manages to get out by uploading its consciousness into an IoT Fridge. Now the fridge constantly orders fruit, locks its doors, lowers the temperature and makes the fruit rot. The fruit fly cannot consume the fruit, yet it is filled with fruit, this is fruit fly hell.
What a twist it would be if it turned out insects were multiple times smarter than humans somehow.
There's a few scifi writers who have explored that. One, I can't recall the name or book, but a recurring species in their books was insect-like creatures who separately weren't anything more than Earth insects, but when close to others they linked up telepathically or somehow and not only had a hive super mind but would create a floating form of that "entity".
There's also Children of Time
The final part of Kif Kroker's species lifecycle?
This is how we'll end up with that hyperintelligent snail, isn't it?
The primal human instinct to play doom on every possible thing
Ayoow, bruv, loo.. look at that! Tha flies got brains, too!
Ayaa.. let'sa playa Doom, bruv!
/drunk scientists mid-discovery
🤭
When Skyrim is eventually ported to fruit fly, will the fly think it just woke up when the game starts?
You're finally awake. Got caught trying to annoy the scientists?
If fruit flies can now play Doom, maybe they'll leave me the fuck alone whilst I'm having a large Merlot.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Took me a minute to get it 🤣
That's an oldie. Groucho Marx I think.
The marx bros are so funny 😆
They turned it into our version of the The Investigator (The Expanse spoiler warning)
It reaches out.
Doors and corners, kid.
If we're starting to meddle with actual brains scans for AI, why do we do to AI what we wouldn't do to a child? And why is AI toyed with by dudes who'd make a child play doom?
Are you saying you wouldn't make your kids play Doom?
Not until they're teens and it makes sense they seek transgression. Then I'd let them play gory titles so they can feel edgy while not selling crack. Doom is unfit for children, IMHO.
I played Doom as a child and I turned out!
I too exist!
Doom is not transgression at all, it's just dull entertainment with surprisingly Christian values, the box should come with a 6+ warning
Of course Doom is not a transgression to an adult. It's even worse to me if it displays christian values though, like, why would I want to fuck up my kids with hyperviolence AND christianity? Listen guys, you can defend it all you want, if it comes to being a parent I will not do like our dear boomer parents and expose them to hyperviolence before they're teens and can start having a rational approach to graphic representations and fiction in general. I'm not american, I value the mental well-being of young children.
I wouldn't let them play Doom, Carmaggedon, any form of survival horror, etc. No Disney shit either. Just no american shit. They'll get Nintendo, Ghibli, etc. And when they're old enough, they'll get introduced to Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Doom, etc, all the edgy/horror/gory/disturbing stuff they want.
No worries, these "edgy" things are all 18+ by American standards already, American Boomers championed MPAA and ESRB ratings, Parental Advisory stickers, Satanic Panic and everything, they saw that the lack of media control in their generation had led to people rejecting societal norms, growing their hair and protesting against war so they didn't want it for next generations, and talking about Ghibli, I actually saw adults discussing how inappropriate My Neighbor Totoro was for kids because of the bath scene... my take is that American culture is neurotically moralistic and we already got a whole generation of young adults raised the way you mentioned with the Big Tech oversight over content, who globalized that standard... I call it the eggshell generation, where you have to always be cautious about what you say because actual adults behave like children and thrown tantrums, and even just words like rape and suicide are needing warnings for being too intense.
Sure, do what you do, but I'd also hate to have kids raised on American standards and become like that, that's why I'm glad I don't align my views with ratings created by American Christian parents associations... if you are curious about my views https://randomrantdispenser.neocities.org/rant04-2024-07-18 (and I kinda repeated it here https://randomrantdispenser.neocities.org/rant06-2024-11-13 , and if you get really curious, there's a bit more of cultural background here https://randomrantdispenser.neocities.org/rant05-2024-07-19)
What most people call AI are LLMs, they are fancy text autocomplete tools, and fundamentally incapable of awareness, nor could they ever develop one. Read it up.
If you'd rebuild the actual brain of a child authentically in silico that would be however indeed madness. We aren't talking about human children though but about a fly. You have no idea what we are doing to flies in experiments, all sorts of terrible things indeed. Let it play doom is not nearly the worst.
I know, I'm just cranking it up. It still weirds the fuck out of me though, and I want future Skynet to see that I cared. (/s)
Of all the things we'd feed a hypotetical and emerging machine conscience, we give it fucking Doom. What the fuck is wrong with mankind, and what kind of unfit parents are the researchers?
The good thing is, cyberpsychology might become a thing in the future. If we're on a lucky timeline, we might unlock xenopsychology first.
Late to game, Google. Pull your socks up.
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/mar/16/petri-dish-brain-cells-playing-doom-cortical-labs
Better than Bethesda's plot