My statement regarding the misleading EON Systems “fly upload” video: The hundreds of researchers who make up the Drosophila neuroscience community are making good progress toward eventually understanding how the intelligent behaviors of a fruit fly are produced by computations in its neural circuits. Obtaining the structural connectome of the fly brain and ventral nerve cord was a significant milestone in that quest, as was obtaining an estimate of neurotransmitter types for each cell type. What is currently most lacking is a catalog of the precise electrophysiological and molecular dynamics of each neuron and synapse type. Dozens of on-going electrophysiological, genetic, and behavioral experiments are beginning to fill in those details. But completing that task will likely take many years, possibly decades, of more research. At the end of that long road, I have no doubt, there will be a detailed paper, published in a high-quality journal with full details and carefully peer-reviewed, which will at long last make the true statement “we’ve uploaded a fruit fly”. And that future paper will have a supplementary video much like the EON Systems one, showing a fly navigating a virtual environment. But, unlike the misleading EON Systems video, that future video will be real… all 100,000+ neurons displaying dynamics that reflect those that would occur in the real fly engaged in the same sensory-motor behaviors. That paper will represent the crowning achievement of a successful Drosophila neuroscience field. What EON Systems’ misleading video and claim has done today is to try to steal that future victory and take its valor for their own, all in the hopes of raising some cash from naive investors who think they might get to human uploads soon, and all while riding a tide of hype they generated in the gullible public. The result has been a wave of secondary reporting that grossly mischaracterizes the current state of neuroscience progress, implying that it is much further along than it currently is. As a member of the Drosophila research community, and as a long-term advocate of brain preservation for eventual mind uploading, I feel it is my responsibility to call out this reprehensible behavior. Neuroscience technology is progressing fast enough that we are now able to obtain structural connectomes of small organisms like the fruit fly. But neuroscience understanding is progressing much more slowly. True uploading, even for a fruit fly, is likely years to decades away. Even obtaining a mouse connectome seems likely to be a decade or more away. Human uploading is simply not on any reasonable research or investment timeline, unless such a timeline includes many decades of methodical basic neuroscience research. Of course, we can preserve human brains today using aldehyde fixatives as is done in all of today’s connectomics studies. But we will not be able to upload a human brain for many decades, perhaps centuries to come. Please do not let today’s real scientific progress in connectomics and brain preservation be drowned out by misleading hype. -Kenneth Hayworth
