What is the implication of this for EA thinking? Does the fly that purely exists in the computer warrant moral consideration, and could we increase the overall welfare of the world by making millions of these simulations with ideal fruit-fly conditions?
They fully copied the brain of the fly, so from my understanding it should also feel pleasure and pain in theory, I think this poses a real conundrum for EA morality.
I lean towards a yes but I am uncertain because I don’t know how the stimuli is fed and I would imagine that the simulated brain, unlike an embodied fruit fly, isn’t perpetually processing information and taking actions. If the latter is true and if it replaces the need for … processing … billions of life fruit flies in labs worldwide, seems like a huge animal welfare win to me.
EDIT: Eon, the company behind this development published a blog post explaining their research, and after reading it, I am much less confident in my lean. This doesn’t seem to be a whole fly brain emulation / a full copy:
First, the Shiu et al. model is a simplified neuron model. It uses leaky integrate-and-fire dynamics rather than morphologically detailed multicompartment neurons, and it relies on inferred neurotransmitter identity and simplified synapse models. This means that dendritic nonlinearities, biophysical channel diversity, and many specific dynamics are not represented. This is enough to recover some sensorimotor transformations, but clearly does not capture the full range of neural activity. Further, internal state, plasticity, learning, hormonal changes are largely missing. Biological flies do not respond to the same sensory input the same way in all contexts. Hunger, satiety, arousal, mating state, egg-laying state, recent sensory history, neuromodulators, and learning all reshape sensorimotor transformations.
To be fair, we’re not unsympathetic to why Eon used the language they did. Their careful blog post on ‘How the Eon Team Produced a Virtual Embodied Fly’ would likely have only been read by a few hundred neuroscientists, while “We’ve uploaded a fruit fly” reached millions. Startup survival requires investment, funding follows excitement, and excitement follows headlines—not careful caveats. This bold approach may even feel obligatory when an organisation’s stated mission is “solving brain emulation as an engineering sprint, not a decades-long research program.”
Researchers simulate an entire fly brain on a laptop. Is a human brain next?
What is the implication of this for EA thinking? Does the fly that purely exists in the computer warrant moral consideration, and could we increase the overall welfare of the world by making millions of these simulations with ideal fruit-fly conditions?
They fully copied the brain of the fly, so from my understanding it should also feel pleasure and pain in theory, I think this poses a real conundrum for EA morality.
I lean towards a yes butI am uncertain because I don’t know how the stimuli is fed and I would imagine that the simulated brain, unlike an embodied fruit fly, isn’t perpetually processing information and taking actions. If the latter is true and if it replaces the need for … processing … billions of life fruit flies in labs worldwide, seems like a huge animal welfare win to me.EDIT: Eon, the company behind this development published a blog post explaining their research, and after reading it, I am much less confident in my lean. This doesn’t seem to be a whole fly brain emulation / a full copy:
Source: How the Eon Team Produced a Virtual Embodied Fly
You’re right that it isn’t a WBE. Also, incentives: