Is there published research? Looking through verious reports, all I see are references to the New Scientist article.
preprint is available https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.02.471005v1
Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
#52I know supply chain issues have researchers trying out novel solutions but this was unexpected. Still, I’m not worried about some new ghoulish supply chain unless it mines crypto.
"The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this." [reveals 1000W PSU and row of graphics cards]
The original story for the Matrix was pretty much that, I've heard. I still wish they'd kept that bit, it made way more sense than using humans as batteries or power supplies.
Re: Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
#53With "Evangelion" being in the (Hacker) news recently, I hope to remind people of this one scene... An advanced AI named "The Three Magi" (which are 3-programs which vote for strategic effects) exists in the show. Without going too much into details, a problem occurs in the AI, so the lead scientist Ritsuko steps into the machine to check things out. She comes with a circular saw. She cuts open one computer (the one…
>This is the first point where the audience probably starts to wonder about the ethics of the main characters.
that's a very impactful scene, but honestly there are moral/ethical red flags about many of the main characters from the very first episode.
Re: Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
#54Re: Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
#55Everyone seems to be joking about this, but doesn’t this result indicate that human neurones have a better learning algorithm than the ones we are using to train AI? It’s interesting that this is evident in even small clumps of human brain tissue. Really interested to know how this might work.
What always perplexes me about AI is that while the neuron models may be reasonably representative of how neurons work in brains, the connections are not similar at all.
Deep learning uses layers. All neurons in layer one connect to layer 2, connect to layer 3, connect to layer 4, and so on...
In a real brain, neurons connect all over the place. It's a bigraph. Deep learning isn't even really a graph per sé, it's a hierarchy, or a weird tree if you will.
I suspect a lot of our intelligence comes from neurons living connecting through a bigraph substrate rather than a hierarchy.
Is there any research on this? Neurons feeding back onto themselves just seems natural to me, but I don't encounter anything on it.
Re: Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
#56With "Evangelion" being in the (Hacker) news recently, I hope to remind people of this one scene... An advanced AI named "The Three Magi" (which are 3-programs which vote for strategic effects) exists in the show. Without going too much into details, a problem occurs in the AI, so the lead scientist Ritsuko steps into the machine to check things out. She comes with a circular saw. She cuts open one computer (the one…
Yes that would be a tricky issue to decide and I personally don’t think we should worry about it. The future generations will have to decide what their ethical framework allows for however I don’t think we’re on the path to putting a human brain in a PC and attaching wires. Though we may meet half way where a lot of our computing resembles biologically accurate neural nets by the end of the century or something (billions or neurons speaking through trillions of connections.)
Maybe this is the first step into getting our society to quit pretending we’re a generation away from human brains being irrelevant. If so I say that’s a good thing, there’s enough doomsaying about the world without trying to write off building cool technology as another apocalyptic fall into dystopia we’re on the verge of.
Re: Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
#57With "Evangelion" being in the (Hacker) news recently, I hope to remind people of this one scene... An advanced AI named "The Three Magi" (which are 3-programs which vote for strategic effects) exists in the show. Without going too much into details, a problem occurs in the AI, so the lead scientist Ritsuko steps into the machine to check things out. She comes with a circular saw. She cuts open one computer (the one…
>This is the first point where the audience probably starts to wonder about the ethics of the main characters. that's a very impactful scene, but honestly there are moral/ethical red flags about many of the main characters from the very first episode.
Well, Gendo is definitely seen as an antagonist by this point. But Ritsuko was the flirtatious smart lady up until this point.
And honestly, her flirting was mostly just trolling / fun. So I don't think anyone suspected the horrors of her designs until this scene.
Re: Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
#58The concept of using human neural networks instead of artificial neural networks is both terrifying and intriguing.
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Re: Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
"In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world" Exhibiting sentience, that's a bit awkward ethically speaking.. Even though this type of testing will help us understand how our brains work.
ethics only comes in when they exhibit consciousness.
You can't prove anything is conscious. How would you test for that?
Re: Clumps of human brain cells in a dish can learn to play Pong faster than an AI
#60As far as I can tell, this is just a clever trick. The cultured neurons aren't really learning anything. The researchers are stimulating one side of the array (top or bottom), to indicate if the ball is above or below the paddle, and based on the ensuing response the computer moves the paddle up or down.
Here's the trick - if you stimulate a group of neurons, their spontaneous activity will be (briefly) different from an unstimulated group. You can use this fact to make it seem like the NN is learning to play pong.
It would be like claiming a network of cats can learn to play pong. I put cats in two different boxes. To tell the cats whether the ball is above or below the paddle I will spray water into one of the boxes. Then I will listen for hissing from both boxes. Based on where I hear the most hissing is the direction i move the paddle.