81–90 of 109 posts
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There is a company working on biologically inspired neural chips called Rain Neuromorphics. https://rain.ai
Yeah but there are lots of companies doing this already including Intel that has poured millions into their Loihi neuromorphic chips.
With "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…
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I’m really disillusioned by science this year. Almost every study I’ve read about on hn in the last year had serious methodology issues
Perhaps that's in the HN comments more than in the research. IME, for as long as I've read HN, commenters have claimed to have found errors in methodology or similar basic problems. I don't know if I've seen any research posted that didn't receive that response.
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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 (bill…
I'm a bit of an opposite opinion, in that the difficult ethics questions were with genetics and not necessarily much different with the brain per se. Henrietta's immortal cancer cells were necessary in a large number of modern medicines, including the testing of the mRNA vaccines (one of the cheapest ways to test for human compatibility is to use isolated human cells for tests). I don't see the brain as any more spec…
Obviously it wouldn’t be this simple (probably) as the conscience depends on the body and it’s motor functions and outputs as a part of its subconscious. You’d replace those with whatever the wires were connected to and hope you were talking to the brain the way you thought. But assuming we could hand wave that it sounds like an ethical debate that could both be had at some point and allow me to sit out of.
Then again when I tried college ethics is the one class I dropped. I like to build things and be able to base them on things it’s possible to infer. Ill leave the ultra nuanced philosophy of what people should do in situations when there are no true answers up to better people than me.
As 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 fro…
Their electrode configuration has predetermined non-overlapping sensory and motor areas. So it would be more like having a whole bunch of cats lined up and spraying water onto the cat corresponding to the ball position, while listening for the hissing from some other cats to determine where to move the paddle. The random stimulus as feedback when the ball resets corresponds to spraying the cats unpredictably. To avoi…
The concept of using human neural networks instead of artificial neural networks is both terrifying and intriguing.
This was the original premise of The Matrix, but it was decided that would be too complicated for the general public to handle, so they made it "the machines use humans as batteries".
Everyone 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 h…
Maybe with some hypothetical analog computer we could have fast training of arbitrary networks.
I cant find the part about "faster than AI" in the research paper. It's very difficult to compare. Do you use a single computer or a cluster? Do you compare wall clock time, or energy consumption, or weigh of the processor, or ...?
Me neither, i don't think that was the interesting part about the paper at all, but the fact that they were even able to train a clump of cells to do something is very exciting. Also their finding that human cells work better than mouse cells.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m really disillusioned by science this year. Almost every study I’ve read about on hn in the last year had serious methodology issues
Perhaps that's in the HN comments more than in the research. IME, for as long as I've read HN, commenters have claimed to have found errors in methodology or similar basic problems. I don't know if I've seen any research posted that didn't receive that response.
Also, most results that reach the front page here are groundbreaking. But groundbreaking results are very rare, so most of them must be fake, because they have an error or because they are an exaggeration.
Most good results are too technical and boring. My favorite example is Magnetoresistance. It's a weird quantum effect that is caused because electrons can have spin up or down. It has a huge effect in the applications and almost everyone had a device that used it. Now the applications are fading. But no one knows it.
There are probably 1000 times more discussions here about faster than light travel than magnetoresistance.
With "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…
I can already envision HFT traders putting human brains into boxes which are then colocated at the exchanges and everyone thinks it's okay.