121–130 of 144 posts
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Finally a sliver of future I'm psyched about. Induce stem cells to form neurons? Next step induce new neurons to form new connections in existing brain!?
Yes but given that mouse neurons were used as a base, you now have a strong craving for cheese.
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Genuine question: why "should" we be going in this direction?
Because we can, and if we don't someone less ethical will.
But they still will, why wouldn't they if supposed ethical researchers do as well. I've heard this sort of argument before, and I understand the reasoning behind it.
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Only religious idiots would prefer a "normal" life over having human-brained gorilla chimeras do all the work and just consuming psychotropics all day, right?
Very few people are not brainwashed in one direction or another, there is no need to call them idiots.
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Transformers have shown that language development can also be explained by what you derisively call reflex behavior, with no need for specialized Chomskyan recursion circuitry, as the same mechanism with slight modification (decision transformers) also plays Pong.
There's a huge difference between fitting a probabilistic model to a data distribution then sampling from it (what GPT-3 is) and agents that invent language and use it to communicate.
The huge difference is actually between animal reflexes and learned behavior. Reflex is built-in. I didn't learn to kick my leg in response to a tap on the patellar tendon.
i would urge people to read the paper instead. The 'learning' is a bit iffy , and this was meant to test the brain theory of Friston rather than plug neurons into pong. Still, great job on the neurotechnology involved and a step in the direction where we should be going, controlling large numbers of neurons Ars Technica has a better article, although they dont describe the dense electode array correctly: https://arst…
Genuine question: why "should" we be going in this direction?
They are using human neurons for this? The one substrate we can be sure of is capable of producing consciousness?
Yeah this makes me really uncomfortable. We have no idea really what causes consciousness to arise, but "enough actual animal/human neurons to perform complex tasks" doesn't seem like an unlikely way to do it to me. "Unimaginable suffering in a petri dish" is not something I want even a tiny chance of creating.
SF author (and marine biologist) Peter Watts described something very much like this, only more advanced, in his book Maelstrom (2001): "Achilles Desjardins had always found smart gels a bit creepy. People thought of them as brains in boxes, but they weren't. They didn't have the parts. Forget about the neocortex or the cerebellum—these things had nothing. No hypothalamus, no pineal gland, no sheathing of mammal over…
I thought you were going to say Starfish by Watts, which also features smart gels.
I didn't have a copy of Starfish handy, and I wasn't sure if gels had been mentioned there or not.
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There's a huge difference between fitting a probabilistic model to a data distribution then sampling from it (what GPT-3 is) and agents that invent language and use it to communicate.
Not much. A transformer trained on multiple senses can learn the sound that an animal makes and associate it with seeing that animal. It can also learn how another agent reacts after it says a word. The huge difference is actually between animal reflexes and learned behavior. Reflex is built-in. I didn't learn to kick my leg in response to a tap on the patellar tendon.
I also agree it's not much different than what's going on in this petri dish with pong.
But I don't think that's a profound statement.
What I'm saying is that calling what a Transformer does "language development" isn't accurate. A Transformer can't "develop" language in that sense, it can only learn "reflexive" behavior from the data distribution it's trained on (it could never have produced that data distribution itself without the data existing in the first place).