It’s been an interesting week in the history of neuroscience and gaming, all thanks to one fruit fly. For those not in the know, scientists employed by Google have successfully mapped and uploaded the full neural network pattern of a Fruit Fly brain onto the internet and have made it open source, allowing anyone to do whatever they want with this fly brain, and the internet being what it is has mostly decided to try to get it to play video games.
Surprisingly it works quite well, with examples like Beat Saber and Overwatch being particular highlights. Whilst I’m no neuroscientist and thus my understanding of the exact nature of how this is done is rudimentary at best, the best summary for how this works I believe is essentially that the fly’s brain scan is effectively a template that an AI or similar software interprets using a simulated virtual body and then has it function in these various environments based on how the program thinks the fly would react. So whilst no actual thought is going on here for this fly, it’s just a machine interpreting thoughts, it’s a scary precedent to set. What if someone created a pain function for the fly, what if someone decided that torturing would be fun for the sake of it even though it isn’t actually thinking, and more importantly, how far does this go?
Perhaps this is getting a bit too existential, at present it’s just seeing a silly virtual fly play Minecraft or whatever, but the fact it was Google that financed this is a worrying trend. I’ll be keeping an eye on this as whilst this is of course a massive step for the field of neuroscience I do wonder how long it will take for it top start getting into the realm of dystopian science fiction.
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.