You Can Now watch the footage of the formerly dead human brain-robot play piano. I am ready for servitors

TL;DR: French researchers released footage of a post-mortem human brain slice learning to play piano through hearing. This research is not only morbid, but also of great value for sensorimotor learning and drug testing. However, the ethical issues are complex, and development is outpacing regulation. ## A Human Brain Slice Learned to Play Piano? What you're looking at is a piece of tissue from a brain that once belonged to a person. It's been connected to a robot and learned to play piano through hearing. This research was published by French researchers in May. It's not just a little morbid—there are solid reasons for doing this, and a whole host of ethical considerations involved. ## Will This Be Commercialized? Most likely not. For robotics or computing, we don't really need adult human brains. But for lab-grown human brains or brain organoids, we have plenty of uses. Entire data centers are already being built around these things. The problem with adult brains is that they've essentially lived a lifetime, and they were grown in an environment where they were part of a brain and body, so they're not very efficient. ## Why This Is Extremely Useful for Research If you think about it, this research is extremely useful for science. A lot of our existing research is done on stem cells, and those cells are very, very young. They represent a person, but essentially a very, very young person. Our alternative is growing human stem cells inside mice, which has its own ethical issues, and it's still a mouse. If we take brain tissue from an adult, that represents an adult who has lived a full life. And you're not just imposing a condition on them—they already have that condition. So they're truly excellent research subjects. And if they can also operate a robot, even better, because we can study sensorimotor learning. This type of research has already brought, and will continue to bring, us treatments. It's our first line of defense before animal testing or human trials. So overall, this is likely ethically defensible. ## The Experiment Itself We've known for a long time that you can take human brain tissue, brain slices, and keep them alive outside the body for weeks. You just need to give them oxygen, glucose, and nutrients, and prevent bacterial infection. Researchers have long known that they continue to have electrical activity—again, for weeks, basically as long as the brain tissue stays alive. However, it's not quite what you'd imagine in an adult human brain. There's no sign of consciousness, at least not the same brain waves we would associate with it. But you can run tests to see how drugs might affect brain activity. The tiny bit of brain activity that does exist. What hasn't been demonstrated until now is: that brain can learn things, and you can create some kind of sensorimotor experience for it. They set up a microphone and connected it to the brain so it could receive meaningful feedback. And it had to first learn how to play the piano through motor babbling—meaning it just randomly does things until it gets it right, and then it receives a small electrical pulse indicating it did it correctly. Our brains are inherently built to learn; they're essentially a physical reservoir computer, except it's an organic, wet, chemical computer. ## The Consciousness Question I know this sounds a bit morbid. But when we talk about individual neurons, no individual neuron has consciousness. Even a cluster of neurons, as far as we know, doesn't have consciousness. However, that's not really fair to say, because we don't actually know what consciousness is. It just might not be equivalent to the experience of a whole brain. My inner scientist is in deep conflict with the part of me that doesn't want people to misunderstand this experiment. It's hard because you have to leave room for uncertainty. There are many things we're not sure about—actually, we're not sure about anything. ## A Virus Made the Brain Forget How to Play Piano Early on, you see the robotic hand basically playing music randomly. You can see a human participant—the researchers were demonstrating to the robotic hand how to play piano. Then they did something different. They gave it the Tania virus (I might be mispronouncing that). This virus isn't very dangerous to humans; it causes flu-like symptoms. But you can see that once the brain got sick, it lost the ability to play. It's probably a good thing I don't work in the field of tech sorcery, because I'm clearly anthropomorphizing the brain slice—but I felt sorry for it. ## Ethics and the Future Research like this is moving fast, and we may need to discuss as a society how to handle its ethics. Because until now—and actually still currently—brain tissue in experiments has been treated like any other tissue. We've never really considered the possibility of reviving human brains to any degree, let alone teaching them to operate a robotic hand playing piano. The researchers themselves are thinking about the ethical implications, and they're also publishing forward-looking papers. But technology is developing much faster than our ability to regulate it. So we can only hope that everyone has good intentions. Personally, when I see papers like this, I'm actually a bit excited. They're genuinely cool. It's the part of me that loves science fiction—and perhaps the part that loves horror. Source: You Can Now watch the footage of the formerly dead human brain-robot play piano. I am ready for servitors (https://youtu.be/fjj5ffchfW8)