And making something like this illegal often has unintended side effects. What if brain organoid research is what ends up curing alzheimer's?
Advocating for outlawing parts of research just on the basis that in the future they could potentially turn unethical is very shortsighted in my opinion.
If you want to argue against wetware then we need a better argument than this. The same ideas were used to argue against stem cell research, IVF, and many other treatments and ideas that have saved and helped lives. Unit 731 isn't an apt comparison because cells are not inherently sentient to our knowledge. If they were it would absolutely shatter the profession of medical ethics as we know it.
We know that human brain cells in sufficiently large and complex assemblages are sentient (I don't know if the word "inherently" has any purpose here). We know this research aims at making the assemblages larger and more complex. It's a fundamentally different kind of argument IMO compared to those against e.g. stem cells or IVF.
(Slight aside but did you know that they're also doing tests on whole human brains taken from corpses, and they give them tranquilizers "just to be sure"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212992)
You write as if objections to (certain kinds of) stem cell research, IVF, etc. have been roundly defeated in some way simply because they've "saved and helped lives". This is naked utilitarianism and I hope I don't have to rehearse the reasons why utilitarianism fails utterly as moral theory.
I wondered if anyone had written about the ethics of this type of research, they have. It's super long so I've not finished it yet, but it generally seems the standard scientific assessment is that current organoids very likely lack the organization needed for "sentience", but, that methods for detecting subjective experience in organoids are not at all well established.
I think the questions would be very much different. LLMs are not made of human brain cells.
From 2004.
I can't help but think of "I have no mouth, and I must scream"