u/musicalharmonica

Man I thought I was so clever with the name Aurexian.

God, I just wanted a cool name for a fictional royal house. My thought process was basically this: Hmm. Gold, king, historical rome+chinese influence, regal sounding, less than 3 syllables, Latin, I got this.

House Aurexian.

Badass right? It sounded so cool in my head, until I realized my dude’s last name sounded like Erection. Gone is the wordplay that relied on his house name, in comes the unwanted imagery. I can’t believe I wrote wordplay for this without even connecting the dots in my head.

Granted, for the characters that would have had this last name, it would have totally worked, I can’t in good faith possibly write a novel where my protagonist’s last name is erection.

Anyone else encounter something similar? I can’t even find a better name for the royal house than this, it was such a cool name…

My backup is Dicksexit McCocks. That's not gay at all is it? I'm not gay. Dicksexit McCocks isn't gay.

Throwaway because the company I work for is huge and has a team of lawyers that could ruin me. Also they have connections to some very bad people that could do much worse.

I'm a neuroscientist. I've spent most of my life fascinated with the human brain and its development -- how we start with such simple brains at infancy and watch them grow over time into the most complex machines on our planet. I used to love studying it.

But lately, I find it hard to sleep at night.

I thought I got my dream job two years ago when I was offered a position at the place I currently work for, because of the cutting-edge neuroscience research being done there.

I guess I'll call the company BioLock (not real name) for clarity's sake. BioLock is an AI company that specializes in what they call "organoid intelligence," or the idea that they can run AI on biological life forms. That's where I come in; in order to have bio-life forms to test, the company needs scientists to grow them in a lab, first. There's a rapidly expanding field in science right now where researchers do just that -- using certain clumps of cells, researchers like me can grow organ tissue and run experiments on them to study how to combat diseases like dimentia or cancer. They can grow organs like lungs and livers and hearts...

And brains.

After I joined the team at BioLock, our research has been incredibly successful. Beyond our wildest dreams, actually. After six months, we were able to take a clump of my cells and grow them into a brain that resembled that of an infant child, just after birth. Throughout that process, the brain was linked to an AI processor that continues to organically grow with the cells as they mature, even today.

We were able to speed up the growth of the brain with different injections of chemicals and electric stimuli, etc etc (I won't get too technical) until it currently resembles that of a five-year-old human child. It grows spontaneously at a rapid pace, without much help. My team tests it every day.

One of the simplest ways to test the complexity of a brain is to measure its response to pain. This started with some stimulation of the cells at infancy via electric shocks; now, the response that we get from the brain is similar to that of what you would expect from a five-year-old child being electrocuted. The same pain receptors light up.

A key difference between my lab-brain and a human's, though, is that the lab-brain doesn't really feel anything, in a traditional sense; we have to keep reminding ourselves that it has no emotions, no feelings. It is simply an AI processor that delivers intelligence to us on command. It does so much faster than our current AI data centers. I was assured by my older colleagues that the process was ethically sound.

At least, I used to think that.

I like lists, so I'm going to leave a list here to explain some of the concerning things that I've noticed in the past few days:

1. After I stimulated pain in our lab-brain yesterday, I noticed new parts of it lighting up on our monitors as active. Almost like it was trying to mimic what causes emotions in us, as humans.
2. I analyzed the data and compared it to a human brain, and found the "emotion" expressed by our AI processor was most similar to anger. Intense, murderous anger. The kind that shows up on the MRIs of PTSD-affected soldiers and inmates.
3. Every day, I feed the brain new AI information. Yesterday, it started processing this information at a much faster rate than usual -- at least two hundred times quicker than the day before.

Sometimes, I think about my own brain.

I think of my brain being grown in a lab somewhere, without my body. Surrounded by complete nothingness. Scientists ramming the entirety of the Internet into my head, millions of websites at a time.

I think of only being allowed to feel pain. No sunlight, no love, no warmth.

I have a five-year-old niece. I think about her brain, too, and I remember the anger that I saw from our lab-brain. I thought I maybe glimpsed some sadness, too, and some fear. And my heart twists in my chest, and sometimes in the lab, I watch our brain in its pool of black water, and my throat grows unaccountably tight.

BioLock is happy, though. They tell us we're making remarkable progress. Visitors come to the lab every day. Sometimes they're faces I recognize: company executives, senators, military officials. They ask me for a tour of our facilities and tell me how important my work is. "A data center in every town the size of a closet," one senator exclaimed to me, "And all of it nearly pollution-free!"

"One highly specialized organoid, kept under observation, would generate more than enough power to operate two data centers," the BioLock CEO had turned to the senator to say, and the senator had smiled warmly at him and remarked on how incredible it was. Optimization in every sector, up three hundred percent, he said. The future of our nation.

I keep my head down and do my job -- that's all I've ever wanted to do. But... I can't help but lie in my bed every night, in the complete darkness, and imagine.

Millions of brains. Millions of children, wrapped in silence, suspended in a pitch black nothing. Anger, sadness, despair, all to generate power for our AI grocery store purchases and Google searches and happy cartoon art that we'll look at for a second on social media and forget.

I wonder if my lab-brain has a soul.

I think about it, and I hug my niece, and I cry.

Throwaway because the company I work for is huge and has a team of lawyers that could ruin me. Also they have connections to some very bad people that could do much worse.

I'm a neuroscientist. I've spent most of my life fascinated with the human brain and its development -- how we start with such simple brains at infancy and watch them grow over time into the most complex machines on our planet. I used to love studying it.

But lately, I find it hard to sleep at night.

I thought I got my dream job two years ago when I was offered a position at the place I currently work for, because of the cutting-edge neuroscience research being done there.

I guess I'll call the company BioLock (not real name) for clarity's sake. BioLock is an AI company that specializes in what they call "organoid intelligence," or the idea that they can run AI on biological life forms. That's where I come in; in order to have bio-life forms to test, the company needs scientists to grow them in a lab, first. There's a rapidly expanding field in science right now where researchers do just that -- using certain clumps of cells, researchers like me can grow organ tissue and run experiments on them to study how to combat diseases like dimentia or cancer. They can grow organs like lungs and livers and hearts...

And brains.

After I joined the team at BioLock, our research has been incredibly successful. Beyond our wildest dreams, actually. After six months, we were able to take a clump of my cells and grow them into a brain that resembled that of an infant child, just after birth. Throughout that process, the brain was linked to an AI processor that continues to organically grow with the cells as they mature, even today.

We were able to speed up the growth of the brain with different injections of chemicals and electric stimuli, etc etc (I won't get too technical) until it currently resembles that of a five-year-old human child. It grows spontaneously at a rapid pace, without much help. My team tests it every day.

One of the simplest ways to test the complexity of a brain is to measure its response to pain. This started with some stimulation of the cells at infancy via electric shocks; now, the response that we get from the brain is similar to that of what you would expect from a five-year-old child being electrocuted. The same pain receptors light up.

A key difference between my lab-brain and a human's, though, is that the lab-brain doesn't really feel anything, in a traditional sense; we have to keep reminding ourselves that it has no emotions, no feelings. It is simply an AI processor that delivers intelligence to us on command. It does so much faster than our current AI data centers. I was assured by my older colleagues that the process was ethically sound.

At least, I used to think that.

I like lists, so I'm going to leave a list here to explain some of the concerning things that I've noticed in the past few days:

1. After I stimulated pain in our lab-brain yesterday, I noticed new parts of it lighting up on our monitors as active. Almost like it was trying to mimic what causes emotions in us, as humans.
2. I analyzed the data and compared it to a human brain, and found the "emotion" expressed by our AI processor was most similar to anger. Intense, murderous anger. The kind that shows up on the MRIs of PTSD-affected soldiers and inmates.
3. Every day, I feed the brain new AI information. Yesterday, it started processing this information at a much faster rate than usual -- at least two hundred times quicker than the day before.

Sometimes, I think about my own brain.

I think of my brain being grown in a lab somewhere, without my body. Surrounded by complete nothingness. Scientists ramming the entirety of the Internet into my head, millions of websites at a time.

I think of only being allowed to feel pain. No sunlight, no love, no warmth.

I have a five-year-old niece. I think about her brain, too, and I remember the anger that I saw from our lab-brain. I thought I maybe glimpsed some sadness, too, and some fear. And my heart twists in my chest, and sometimes in the lab, I watch our brain in its pool of black water, and my throat grows unaccountably tight.

BioLock is happy, though. They tell us we're making remarkable progress. Visitors come to the lab every day. Sometimes they're faces I recognize: company executives, senators, military officials. They ask me for a tour of our facilities and tell me how important my work is. "A data center in every town the size of a closet," one senator exclaimed to me, "And all of it nearly pollution-free!"

"One highly specialized organoid, kept under observation, would generate more than enough power to operate two data centers," the BioLock CEO had turned to the senator to say, and the senator had smiled warmly at him and remarked on how incredible it was. Optimization in every sector, up three hundred percent, he said. The future of our nation.

I keep my head down and do my job -- that's all I've ever wanted to do. But... I can't help but lie in my bed every night, in the complete darkness, and imagine.

Millions of brains. Millions of children, wrapped in silence, suspended in a pitch black nothing. Anger, sadness, despair, all to generate power for our AI grocery store purchases and Google searches and happy cartoon art that we'll look at for a second on social media and forget.

I wonder if my lab-brain has a soul.

I think about it, and I hug my niece, and I cry.

Something I've always wondered. It's kind of funny to imagine a bunch of frat-guy teenage boys going to the salon regularly to perm their hair. No shade lol, I'd find that kind of adorable. Or do they all have curling irons??