As fruit fly connectome demos go viral, a blogger probes the moral unease
genmon · x · 2026-09-28
A thoughtful Interconnected essay unpacks the author's nagging unease at the AI world's playful craze around the fruit fly connectome. Google Research and partners released the complete male fruit fly brain map on September 3 — 166,000 neurons across brain and nerve cord, freely downloadable with neuron-type simulators. Since then hundreds of demos have appeared: the connectome playing Beat Saber, DesktopFly (a spiking-simulation 3D fly living on macOS, built from FlyWire wiring and the MaleCNS brain-to-leg network), and Fly64 hooking MaleCNS up to Super Mario 64 (with your own ROM — the author notes Nintendo has more IP over Mario than the fly over its connectome). The author doesn't want the experiments to stop, but interrogates whether the discomfort comes from imagining a creature trapped and tormented in a software prison — a meditation on the ethics of digital neural specimens.
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