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

71–80 of 111 posts

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#71

Post by andai »

golergka wrote: post #59
mandelken wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if that logic goes the other way. If we succeed in creating a being with intelligence equivalent to 100 humans, would experimenting on it be 100x as unethical as experimenting on humans?

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#72

Post by barkingcat »

dr1337 wrote: post #70
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #18

>programmers usually have to engage in a laborious process of manually adjusting the initial coefficients, or weights, that will be applied to each type of data point the network processes. Another challenge is to get the software to balance how much it should be trying to explore new solutions to a problem versus relying on solutions the network has already discovered that work well. “All these problems are complete…

Are you tuning hyperparameters when learning a task?

Yes, the amount of caffine, food (enzymes, proteins, carbs), and if it is a long running learning process, amount of sleep. all parameters are being tuned all the time.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#73

Post by SuoDuanDao »

battery_cowboy wrote: post #45
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.

Do we know enough about consciousness to ethically put a "brain in a vat" yet?

I think the time to have that discussion is when the volume of neural tissue we're talking about is similar to a mouse's brain, until then it seems too detached from the realities on the ground to be much use.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#74

Post by shrthnd »

altivasta wrote: post #66
bencollier49 wrote: post #48

Why specifically human neurons? Why source the neurons from human stem cells rather than mouse cells? PR I suppose.

Humans are closest to humans in terms of behavior, so it makes sense to use them in testing where possible

Donated my body to science... woke up as a living computer.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#75

Post by throw1234651234 »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #39
jcims wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Very cool, I added this to my 'biohacker' list of links. And lol @ your Egg Benedict Donburi from Food Wars. I still haven't started season 2... check out Dotchi No Ryouri, it used to run on PBS but can be found on youtube.

Can you post that list please?

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#77

Post by eyeundersand »

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…

> A dragonfly nervous system is probably simpler than some of the largest artificial neural networks models.

I would be extremely surprised if that were the case. Behavior of a single cell alone is unimaginably complex. Let alone an organ system, let alone the nervous system.

I will agree with your Qualia point.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#78

Post by Der_Einzige »

totalZero wrote: post #61
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?

We are all machines. The idea that one type of machine or another cannot feel "pain" is simply a rationalization for human behavior that causes harm to other organisms, like hunting and fishing and killing wasps. Pain is a sensation that drives an animal to quickly react to injurious situations. Consider a robot made with Brooks's subsumption architecture [1]. The basal level of behavior drive of the robot is its sel…

Hahaha, no. There is no ghost in the Shell in AI powered robots and certainly not in inanimate objects. You sound like an object oriented ontology writer with this kind of post and will be treated as such because that's what you've advocated for.

The alternative is fear of hurting objects or machines everytime I act in the world. Physical objects themselves are not ethical actors. AI is not life and we are several hundred years away from being capable of creating life ourselves within an object (if it's at all possible) Your worldview would mean that if I move a machine (or rock) and it appears to "resist me", I must fear that the machine or rock doesn't want to be moved. I must believe that I have acted violently towards that object by "frustrating it's preferences".

What absurdity!

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#79

Post by snakeboy »

andai wrote: post #71
golergka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if that logic goes the other way. If we succeed in creating a being with intelligence equivalent to 100 humans, would experimenting on it be 100x as unethical as experimenting on humans?

As far as I am aware, intelligence is not the variable we care about with respect to ethical experimentation. Rather, consciousness. All humans are assumed equally conscious, while clearly not equally intelligent.

Similarly, we understand (at least mammalian) brain structure well enough to identify animals like cows to probably have relatively minimal conscious lived experience, even if they have ample processing power, i.e. "intelligence".

So at least in examples from nature, there is no reason to believe that intelligence and conscious lived experience need be correlated meaningfully.

So in your example, we would need some way to quantify the degree to which it's conscious, rather than intelligent.

Re: A startup is building computer chips using real neurons

#80

Post by citizenpaul »

throwqqq wrote: post #32
pfisch wrote: post #24

This sounds like an episode of black mirror and seems immoral. If this actually does work and scale the results would be horrific. I don't really want brains with no rights to exist like this.

1/3 of the human brains in the world already exist with no rights. If we can enslave rats instead it will be a big step up.

100% of human brains exist with no rights. There are just temporary privileges. Ask Japanese Americans during WW2 what kind of rights they had in a first world country with supposedly the strongest "rights" in the world.
Post reply on HN