>>14320762I'm not as bothered by this as perhaps OP is, and it's actually a really interesting field that I myself have studied, but the lead researcher, Josh Bongard, actually works at my uni and in my department, and if you look him up, he himself has emphasized that this is a very sensitive area of research that raises a lot of philosophical questions, both in philosophy of biology, mind, and complex systems, but also in ethics.
There are a variety of ethical concerns that these types of experiments raise, both for the organisms and cells which are subject to these experiments, and also for the humans conducting the research and the societies in which they live. A lot of it is typical stuff that you might hear about AI, but it also raises some unique problems that don't arise with old fashioned silicon computing, because we're dealing with living, biological material, rather than electronic hardware. There's a lot more that could be said about this, but just as an example, Josh Bongard actually briefly discusses some of these issues in this interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaP9nMulfWwI don't really have any problem with this research whatsoever, and I actually think it's really interesting, but it definitely raises a new set of ethical problems that researchers should be mindful of in the future - and exploring those sorts of issues and questions is actually one of the (many) things that makes this sort of research interesting. More generally, all areas of research, computing, biology, psychology, marketing, etc. raise their own ethical problems and concerns that researchers in those fields should be mindful off (even if many of them aren't). We're definitely entering new territory with this sort of research, so it will naturally raise new ethical concerns and issues.
