[ExI] A Digital Fly Brain Has Taken Over the Internet

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A Digital Fly Brain Has Taken Over the Internet
By Becky Ferreira  · Sep 15, 2026

<https://www.404media.co/a-digital-fly-brain-has-taken-over-the-internet/>
Quotes:
A digital fly brain has been trading bitcoin, parallel parking,
exploring bisexuality, cutting doner kebab, playing games—including
Minecraft, Doom, and Beat Saber—and generally lighting up social media
timelines since it was released earlier this month.

The simulated brain, known as a connectome, is a complete map of more
than 166,000 neurons that make up the nervous system of an adult male
Drosophila fruit fly.

In addition to fueling a wave of giddy online experimentation, the
connectome has sparked moral and ethical debates on Reddit and other
forums. However, it’s worth emphasizing that MaleCNS v1.0 is only a
digital map of the brain that is not capable of sentience or conscious
perception in any tangible biological sense. The connectome recreates
a fly’s neural wirings and overall structure, but it does not contain
any of the complex biochemical makeup of the real organism upon which
it is based.
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AIs and fly brains on the internet!  What next?
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