Human brain cells in a petri dish learned to play Doom — welcome to wetware AI. Plus: fruit fly brain emulation, digital brain uploads, and forever torture prison for $1,000/month.

Researchers wired up living human brain cells on microelectrode arrays and got them running Doom. Not metaphorically. The cells are doing the processing. Hunter calls it inevitable. Daniel calls it horrifying. They're both right.

Then it gets weirder. A company called Aeon Systems took a fruit fly brain — the whole brain — mapped every neuron, and dropped a digital copy into a virtual body. The digital fly started doing fly stuff. Their next goal: mouse brains. After that? Yours.

That's when Hunter offers Daniel $1,000 a month to rent a copy of his brain and put it in digital hell. Permanently. The conversation spirals from there into whether a digital you is really you, how Coca-Cola would use your brain clone to A/B test Corn Flakes commercials 300,000 times, and exactly how many human organs you'd have to grow in a vat before you've accidentally committed a felony. (Skeleton in a vat? That's a crime. Brain cells on a chip? Apparently that's just science.)

They also tackle the AI sin eater problem, why Hunter won't grant personhood to anything in the cloud for at least 500 years, and why Daniel has never once been mean to a hidden Markov model.

⏱️ CHAPTERS

0:00 Meet Gary, Our New Producer
1:39 Hunter & Daniel Are Back — HeyGen, AI-Maxing & More
6:33 Brain Organoid Plays Doom — Wetware Computing Explained
10:04 Fruit Fly Brain Emulation — Aeon Systems' Digital Mind
12:29 Would You Upload Your Brain? Digital Consciousness Debate
16:55 Why You Should Be Nice to Your AI
19:18 Can a Digital Copy of You Have Rights? AI Personhood
20:53 Brain in a Vat — When Does Wetware AI Become Human?
23:24 Are We Living in a Simulation? Wrap-Up

⚡ Listen now & get self-aware before your tools do.

🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc
🍎 Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297
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📢 Engage

Hunter offered $1,000/month to rent Daniel's brain and send it to digital hell. What's YOUR price? Drop it in the comments — or tell us no amount is enough.

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🧠 They Might Be Self-Aware — but are we?

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