STEM progress is currently not embedded within a framework of wisdom about how to live well. This is leading us to do things like create computers out of brain organoids, without understanding their valence properties. This is really bad behaviour and not a good look for the future of consciousness. Rather than blindly accelerating we should be applying wisdom so that we can wield our powers for good and create a positive future for conscious beings to inhabit.
The brain organoids lecture put me in a dark mood to be honest. It seems like commercial interests and applications are _already_ blinding researchers to the absolutely essential first step of figuring out how to compute the valence of these things. Incentives are such that researchers are likely to hide information that suggests these systems suffer so that their research isn't stopped by ethicists, who themselves also of course lack a sense of the need for a theory of valence. They believe reinforcement learning or nociception is how suffering is implemented, which IMO are already falsified theories of valence. We're in crunch time.
