Scientists have now managed to get a collection of human brain cells to play Doom, and I’m not sure what to make of this.
As reported by Gizmodo, a company called Cortical Labs has released a new marketing video that demonstrates “real neuron gameplay” featuring a petri dish of human neurons playing the 1993 game, Doom.
Doom has become one of those games that is infamous for being ported to pretty much any piece of tech you can get your hands on. In addition to PC, mobile, and console, you can play Doom on a vape, on your smart fridge, and even on a pregnancy test.
But I can’t say I’ve ever heard of, or even considered the possibility, that this would be a thing we’re using science for.
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Cortical Labs is running Doom on its CL-1 neural computing system, which is a microchip mounting 200,000 human neurons on something it calls a “multi-electrode array”. The company had previously used this to get human brain cells to play Pong a few years ago.
While the number of neurons is extremely small compared to the number that’s in an actual human brain, it appears to be enough to be able to play and understand Doom.
Cortical Labs explains that the microchip is mapping various elements of on-screen data to patterns of electric stimuli, which is then transmitted to the neurons. Following this, the neurons send back signals of their own to control the player’s movement and actions in Doom.
The company also says that the neurons are learning. At the moment, it’s playing like a beginner who has never used a computer before, but given enough time it may learn enough to become extremely skilled at the game.
Anyway, I’m a little horrified by this in many ways, and it certainly raises a lot of ethical questions.
Right now, it seems that the cells in the microchip aren’t complicated enough to have a consciousness, and it’s instead just using the cells as a primary processing method following some kind of model or algorithm.
But it does open the door to other troubling scenarios further down the line as this technology advances, the kind of stuff explored by several Black Mirror episodes.
Do we draw the line when these cells are capable of consciousness? Or do scientists and tech executives continue to be so preoccupied with whether or not they could create the Torment Nexus, they don’t stop to think if they should?
