Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 111 posts

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#21

Post by s_gourichon »

taneq wrote: post #20
h0l0cube wrote: post #12

> Currently, the company is working to get its mini-brains—which so far are approaching the processing power of a dragonfly brain—to play the old Atari arcade game Pong I'm surprised that no-one has discussed whether these systems could develop emergent qualia, and experience pain. No joke. Are there any ethical frameworks around this kind of research?

I don't think qualia are real in the general objective case, only in the subjective case. So nobody but 'you', whoever you are, can actually have them.

Ok let's rephrase then: can those mini-brains be a "you"?

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#25

Post by NeuronNerd »

jcims wrote: post #14
monocasa wrote: post #6

Pretty weird not to comment that they're replicating published work that trained mouse neurons on an electrode array to fly a plane in a flight simulator. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041022104658.h... It's about at the level where you could make a good attempt to replicate it as a hobby in your (albeit well stocked) garage.

> It's about at the level where you could make a good attempt to replicate it as a hobby in your (albeit well stocked) garage. Already being done: https://youtu.be/V2YDApNRK3g Doesn’t hurt to join forces with another ‘well stocked garage‘ featured earlier on HN: https://youtu.be/V2YDApNRK3g

Once your garage is that 'well stocked' you might as well call a lab! I think you might be drastically underestimating the difficulties inherent in both cell culture and programming in getting this sort of thing to work.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#26

Post by mimentum »

whoisjuan wrote: post #5

What’s the goal of this though? I couldn’t determine it from the article, but I’m certain that using them as transistors just for the sake of saving energy doesn’t make sense. Especially since a neuron size is a about 4000nm or more than 500x larger than the new 7nm transistors. No way energy consumption is justifiable with such a massive loss of chip real estate. You will need way larger chips to achieve a decent co…

Well considering, many humans solved complex problems for thousands of years, with just the human brain for power, at about 20W of power consumption. One could argue that the human brain, or nature is more efficient at processing than that of a computer of equal power.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#27

Post by paulrouget »

jcims wrote: post #14
monocasa wrote: post #6

Pretty weird not to comment that they're replicating published work that trained mouse neurons on an electrode array to fly a plane in a flight simulator. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041022104658.h... It's about at the level where you could make a good attempt to replicate it as a hobby in your (albeit well stocked) garage.

> It's about at the level where you could make a good attempt to replicate it as a hobby in your (albeit well stocked) garage. Already being done: https://youtu.be/V2YDApNRK3g Doesn’t hurt to join forces with another ‘well stocked garage‘ featured earlier on HN: https://youtu.be/V2YDApNRK3g

That video was fascinating…

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#28

Post by MaxBarraclough »

taneq wrote: post #20
h0l0cube wrote: post #12

> Currently, the company is working to get its mini-brains—which so far are approaching the processing power of a dragonfly brain—to play the old Atari arcade game Pong I'm surprised that no-one has discussed whether these systems could develop emergent qualia, and experience pain. No joke. Are there any ethical frameworks around this kind of research?

I don't think qualia are real in the general objective case, only in the subjective case. So nobody but 'you', whoever you are, can actually have them.

Meaning what? That doesn't bring any light to the question of whether these things are capable of suffering. As someone else said, this is a hard problem to reason about.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#29

Post by anonytrary »

Sosh101 wrote: post #13
h0l0cube wrote: post #12

> Currently, the company is working to get its mini-brains—which so far are approaching the processing power of a dragonfly brain—to play the old Atari arcade game Pong I'm surprised that no-one has discussed whether these systems could develop emergent qualia, and experience pain. No joke. Are there any ethical frameworks around this kind of research?

I think that is a very valid concern, but how could this ever be assessed

If something cannot be assessed, then are we still accountable for the result? Or, do we simply discard the assessment?

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#30

Post by rl3 »

2015 (my words):

>Obviously the aforementioned experiment would be completely unethical, but it's interesting to ponder it as a hypothetical - that today we may have the capability to bootstrap a superintelligent machine using biology as a computational shortcut. But we can't, because ethics. [0]

2020 (article):

>Chong said the pair were interested in the idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI for short)—A.I. that has the flexibility to perform almost any kind of task as well or better than humans. “Everyone is racing to build AGI, but the only true AGI we know of is biological intelligence, human intelligence,” Chong said. He noted the pair figured the only way to get human-level intelligence was to use human neurons.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9973122

Post reply on HN