Scientists are Growing Humanoid Brains and Putting Them Into Robots. This Will Not End Well.
Source – Teams at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are experimenting with lumps of tissue taken from fossil bones of our early ancestors
They’ve reportedly managed to grow tiny brains, about the size of a pea, in petri dishes inside labs.
They say the next step is to link these cavemen brains to robots using neural implants to try and create a kind of Neanderthal cyborg.
This, in turn, will allow them to find out what caused Neanderthals to go extinct – leaving homo sapiens to colonise the Earth. …
It takes several months to grow the Neanderthal DNA–containing stem cells into these tiny brains called “organids”. And, once finished, they come out in a strange “popcorn” shape compared to the spherical human organids.
The team are planning to wire them up to crab-like robots to see how the two compare with each other.
“Ultimately, we want to compare the Neanderthalised organoid [with the robot] to test its ability to learn,” said Alysson Muotri, a member of the research team at UCSD.
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Let’s grow a Neanderthal brain in a lab, they said. Let’s put the brain in a robot crab, they said. Sure, let’s create a part man/part cyborg. What’s the worst that could happen?
With all due respect to Alysson Muotri, just what in the hell do you think you’re doing? You leave me no choice but to Full Goldblum on your ass. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses. Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. This isn’t some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam. Neanderthals had their shot, and nature selected them for extinction.
But now you’re bringing them back, in cyborg form. So you can “test its ability to learn.” Well that’s just great. And what happens when it does learn, huh? What happens when Crabby McOrganoid here starts growing? When it becomes self-aware. When it becomes smarter than the whole nerd crew at UCSD and decides to make a better robot crab body? And indestructible one. With weapons. And starts growing other brains and more cybercrabs in order to multiply? Then no one will be giving a shit how Neanderthal went extinct. They’ll be wondering how we went extinct and it will all because of you irresponsible geeks. And you won’t think you’re so clever then.
And when it does happen, I won’t blame the Neanderthalised organoids. I just want to be on record as saying that for when they do take over. And welcome the chance to serve our robot overlords as one of the few good homo sapiens, worth keeping around. As Goldblum himself put it, life … finds a way.