godspeed you! yuri warrior

First fully synthetic lifeform may start with this worm

I did volunteer work on a project last year that was working on doing the same thing with a fruit fly's brain, which is about 400 times bigger. We actually published results earlier this month! https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546656v2.full

I've been volunteering for these projects for a decade this May and it's been like my personal introduction to the growth of AI. Originally it was a giant 3D coloring book with areas the AI was pretty sure was one complete object that were maybe 10 nanometers (!) a "side" (they were maybe cylindrical if you were lucky but often just messy blobs) and while it was still a daunting task for a collaboration of labs to accomplish it became a simple enough task that you could distribute to volunteers and they could map out entire neurons within a day or two. For reference the experts charting c. elegans took more than a decade for its 302 neurons. They were also like coloring in 2D pictures by hand, let alone stacking several on top of each other to get a 3D shape. Now, though, the AI is able to get near-complete pathways of entire neurons (but will still make fuckups that have to be checked by a person), but you're talking about getting neurons finished by 1 person in 20 minutes, or a couple hours if it's messy.

It's also largely outpaced the growth of the citizen science projects that accompanied this (initially looking at tiny slices of mouse brains) that I think all of the open projects people can work on themselves exist only on leftover data people have largely moved on from? Which is a little sad but it's not like this is a completely closed door to volunteers and it's also like the most ethical use case for AI that I can think of because it's replacing 0 jobs just taking tedious work away from volunteers who themselves were taking it away from tired grad students.

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