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A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

fortune.com

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Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#51

Post by meowface »

ganzuul wrote: post #33
anonytrary wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Human neural networks definitely are capable of suffering. These researchers might be re-inventing slavery.

So could any future AI researcher, regardless of the substrate.

I suspect this idea is so widespread at this point that these researchers and others are aware of this possibility and see the potential moral issues. I just think they believe such a thing is still decades (or longer) away, and I think they're probably right.

Right now, just about everyone wildly sensationalizes things that appear to suggest conscious man-made entities, like the AIs that supposedly "invented their own language". I think we're so eager to see it even when there's nothing close to it that once it actually does happen, we'll realize it quickly and understand the implications.

There is the possibility that it could somehow develop despite no external signs of it, but all we can do is try to be as cognizant of the possibility as we can.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#52

Post by MaxBarraclough »

nnq wrote: post #50
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?

> could develop emergent qualia If we were to admit there really is such thing as "qualia", there's not reason you wouldn't ask the same question about non-biological software or hardware systems... electronic hardware or biological hardware can have same computational qualities. But since OBJECTIVELY there's no such things as qualia (the concept only exist SUBJECTIVELY), it could only exist by definition for "a pers…

I'm inclined to agree. To put it another way, then: what matters isn't the substrate (neurons vs transistors), but what you do with them.

Going this route, we'd have to say that if you wrote a program that perfectly simulated the human brain, you've built a conscious system running on transistors.

It also means that if you built a RISC-V processor based on a large number of neurons (say, as many as are in a human brain), you haven't built a conscious system, despite that it's neuron-based.

I'm ignoring the obvious problems with building a RISC-V using neurons; they strike me as incidental detail, for our purposes here.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#53

Post by mandelken »

jimmaswell wrote: post #42
rl3 wrote: post #30

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.…

The human neurons are sourced entirely ethically, from skin cells to stem cells that make neurons somehow.

If you can recreate (part of) a human brain through stem cells or any other way , then why would this not be a human? People with half a brain (after an accident, say) are still people. Cloned people (twins) are still people. Babies born from artificial insemination are still people. It's not up to these researcher to determine what is allowed to do with human brain tissue. Very troubling and unethical

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#54

Post by h0l0cube »

colordrops wrote: post #17
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?

Are only biological systems capable of experiencing qualia? What is to say that a silicon computer can't also have subjective experiences?

I do sometimes entertain the idea of panpsychism (like perhaps a rock is conscious), and consciousness may not be substrate dependent, but I can be certain, by at least my own anecdata, that neurons give rise to qualia.

The jury is still out on this, but a big-world network with some quantum computation could be enough. The 'hard problem of consciousness' is that we can't really know by observing a system whether it is conscious or not, or rather a sort of 'zombie' that has all the features resembling a conscious being without qualia.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#55

Post by meowface »

rl3 wrote: post #49
jimmaswell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human neurons are sourced entirely ethically, from skin cells to stem cells that make neurons somehow.

> The human neurons are sourced entirely ethically, from skin cells to stem cells that make neurons somehow. Yes, and I'd wager the scale at which their experiment is currently operating is very likely ethical too. In fact, I'm not saying anything they're doing right now is unethical. My use of the term unethical was in context of hypothetical experiments on a scale that would make Dr. Frankenstein's stomach churn. T…

As long as they treat the brains in vats with the same ethics as we treat human newborns, as soon as they believe there's any possibility it could be conscious, what's the problem?

(The problem of course is the possibility of it becoming conscious before we realize it, but it's very up in the air to what degree that's actually a risk. My intuition is that we'll see clear signs of it before it even fully forms.)

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#56

Post by MaxBarraclough »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #38
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the point where you end up in the realm of philosophy and phenomenology.

Correct. The question stands.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#57

Post by h0l0cube »

nnq wrote: post #50
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?

> could develop emergent qualia If we were to admit there really is such thing as "qualia", there's not reason you wouldn't ask the same question about non-biological software or hardware systems... electronic hardware or biological hardware can have same computational qualities. But since OBJECTIVELY there's no such things as qualia (the concept only exist SUBJECTIVELY), it could only exist by definition for "a pers…

I've answered to these points in another comment. But I'll emphasize, that I know (and presume you know) within some minimum epistemic bound^, that we can suffer pain and that arises from our neurological systems. It can't be known what other systems/substrates could experience qualia, and even if they have the outward markers of consciousness, they could be 'zombies'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

^ i.e., not in some adversarial simulation etc.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#58

Post by rl3 »

meowface wrote: post #55
rl3 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The human neurons are sourced entirely ethically, from skin cells to stem cells that make neurons somehow. Yes, and I'd wager the scale at which their experiment is currently operating is very likely ethical too. In fact, I'm not saying anything they're doing right now is unethical. My use of the term unethical was in context of hypothetical experiments on a scale that would make Dr. Frankenstein's stomach churn. T…

As long as they treat the brains in vats with the same ethics as we treat human newborns, as soon as they believe there's any possibility it could be conscious, what's the problem? (The problem of course is the possibility of it becoming conscious before we realize it, but it's very up in the air to what degree that's actually a risk. My intuition is that we'll see clear signs of it before it even fully forms.)

>My intuition is that we'll see clear signs of it before it even fully forms.

Probably, though I wouldn't be so sure we'll know what to make of more complex computer-brain hybrids:

"These neurons are then embedded in a nourishing liquid medium on top of a specialized metal-oxide chip containing a grid of 22,000 tiny electrodes that enable programmers to provide electrical inputs to the neurons and also sense their outputs."

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#59

Post by golergka »

mandelken wrote: post #53
jimmaswell wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human neurons are sourced entirely ethically, from skin cells to stem cells that make neurons somehow.

If you can recreate (part of) a human brain through stem cells or any other way , then why would this not be a human? People with half a brain (after an accident, say) are still people. Cloned people (twins) are still people. Babies born from artificial insemination are still people. It's not up to these researcher to determine what is allowed to do with human brain tissue. Very troubling and unethical

Aborted fetuses have 1/1000th of a human brain, but we (as in, the mainstream political opinion on HN) don't consider them human. And being in OP would have much less than that.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#60

Post by tartoran »

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 am not an expert but from my understanding pain are signals perceived as what we subjectively call painful when something in our body/nervous system is damaged/inflamed or a system is out of whack. It is a very useful thing, it is trying to tell us something useful so we can act on it or just be aware of it. When something is out of whack permanently something in this system is malfunctioning. Without a body it is hard to describe the concept of pain and what it may feel to an emergent system with qualia properties. The closest I could think of is some kind of distress signal or base frequency change when the said system is under stress or wrong state and is perhaps used to self correct the system to a balanced state. If something is permanently painful then it ceases to be a reliable signal.

Psychological pain or emotional pain or distress may come closer to what such a system could experience and but it could also be an emergent property of such a system but we don't fully understand how this works. If such a system has emotional capability then it should be able to experience it because pain is such a state of the emotional spectrum. No pain no joy - no oscillation/flat

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