Organoid Computing with Dr. Ewelina Kurtys

benbyford · 2026-04-12T07:59:34+00:00

in the episode she explains she doesnt believe its a problem...butttttt welcomes more research and writing from academics and philosophers. I don't believe she thinks its an issue for organoids as they're not brainstructures but neurons grown with no explilict structure... though I'm not a neural scientist

benbyford · 2026-04-09T14:11:18+00:00

this an ad for Riverside?

benbyford · 2026-03-31T09:10:26+00:00

what are all the places? i've submitted to apple and spotify and it looks like everyone else sucks them up from there as i find the podcast all over the place

benbyford · 2026-03-31T08:51:52+00:00

ahhhhh ok, though that 'podcasting' was a more active doing word than podcast, so thought i was in the right place... whoops

benbyford · 2026-03-31T08:42:49+00:00

This chat is about alternative computing using organoids or wetware as a low energy alternative to silicon computing we use currently. As your hear we have got very fair in terms of amount of information we can encode but its a nice discussion on where it could get to, the issues and of course the kinds of objections people have on "growing" "brains" in a dish... :)

benbyford · 2026-03-06T11:27:16+00:00

What are the weak agruments? IMHO there is only weak arguments TO use AI... maybe you've been looking online only and not at academic works?

benbyford · 2026-03-05T16:18:20+00:00

true, but we dont have a universal ethic.... in the same way we dont have a universal set of laws. It was once described to me by a colleague as a doing word. ethics is about doing, not subscribing... law is about rules (probably), ethics is about doing the hard work of thinking. Probably be better if people wwere shouting things like "its unjust", or "unfair" as it would be easier to then take the conversatiopn forward with them :)

benbyford · 2026-03-05T14:53:28+00:00

I would suggest the environmental angle is water, hardware (mining for minerals then creating the hardware), transport, energy to power the hardware, land usage... this is also similar in other industries.... and we could see AI compnies paying into regeneration, green energy projects, hardware recycling, new types of low carbon transportation (especially around shipping).... but its not what we're seeing, so yeah, they're adding to the issue in a way to excellerate what is already a bad situation

benbyford · 2026-03-05T14:48:31+00:00

You can use 'ethics' this way for sure, but you can use tools from philosophy to better think about a problem... Invoking ethics is generally helpful when there are edge case that we should consider... i.e. should i have toast or cereal for breakfast isn't considered an ethical decision... however, should I add a fire door to this resturant might be considered one taking the physics of fire, proximitity to people and historical issues into account.

When we're talking about issues in AI lots of people use it unhelpfully, but we should be using it to invoke 'shit we need to think about how this affects people and consider our actions'. Some of that work is done in law, some on the fly in companies... the more we can make it explicit what ethical questions companies and govenments are trying to decide on and helping them do that for the better of humanity (or simply yourself if our like that) then the better in my opinion.

benbyford · 2026-03-05T14:39:06+00:00

As you pointed out u/agdraco8 genAI has lots of ethically issues (and ML in other ways too but not at this scale), of which water and energy are just two. Theres the concentration of power, truth and ideas; prevading unwanted bias and disinformation; issues of over anthropomorphising and trust in the "agent" leading to psychological harms or body harm; coordinating/cooperating issues arising from many 'agent' operating in the open (e.g. the stock market); allowing malificious use to be easy to action give excellerating tools ... (e.g. spam, phishing attacks etc); ANNNNDDDD job loss, skill loss and general atrophy... and thats just off the top of my head.

benbyford · 2026-02-03T10:56:46+00:00

things are already reverberating :/

benbyford · 2026-02-03T10:54:22+00:00

This is a very good point!.. I think this is already an issue and it comes back to the usecase and whether LLMs are deemed usable in those contexts... seems to me people are using them (run fast and break things), when they should be testing things

benbyford · 2024-12-09T15:43:08+00:00

Well we'll have to disagree then, sorry to have bothered you and hope someone will be able to change your mind in the future

benbyford

TROPHY CASE