A new prayer for the fruit fly connectome

I have moral queasiness about the fruit fly work going on in the AI world – I’m not 100% sure why. We need to invent new prayers, that’s where my thoughts take me. Bear with me while I think it through… In case you missed it: Google Research and partners mapped the complete brain of fruit fly (3 September). It’s a common bug and common in scientific research. The male fruit fly has 166,000 neurons across the brain and main nerve cord; the map is called the connectome. Long story short, the connectome is now available for free download, you can get a simulator of the different types of neurons, it caught the imagination of the internet, over September there has been all kinds of wild nonsense (impressive nonsense!). e.g. here’s a GIF of the fruit fly connectome playing Beat Saber (a VR rhythm game). And now there are 100s of demos with embedded fruit fly sims. Such as DesktopFly: "A 3D fruit fly that lives on your macOS desktop, with spiking simulations built from FlyWire brain wiring…

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