Gosh, that study. It was the first time my faith in academia was severely shaken. As a 19yo, I spent around 6 hours reverse engineering what was going on, and then fell into a spiral of “Is this what academia is all about? Really?” Because I was so fascinated by the concept, then it was such a letdown…
It took some time to appreciate that there are some worthwhile ideas in that paper. But it was my first experience with “Academic lies about accomplishment to secure further funding.”
It’s hard to say whether “lie” or “severely exaggerate” is appropriate.
A method existed to measure a signal from a neuron. A second method existed to modify that signal. Whenever the plane crashed, the signal was modified slightly, until the plane flew level.
It didn’t learn to fly. The researcher modified a neuron (steady signal) until it gave the appropriate signal (e.g. zero) to fly level.
Negative signal, plane banks left. Positive signal, plane banks right. If plane crashes, modify neuron until signal is neither positive nor negative. That was the extent of the study.
In that context, do you feel like the neurons learned to fly? Maybe. It’s certainly similar in spirit to reinforcement learning in modern times. But I wouldn’t say that setting a signal to zero is a nice definition of “flew a plane”.
In other words, there was no active feedback; if you pointed the plane in a slightly different direction, it would immediately crash. It wasn’t doing anything more than setting the signal slowly over time to an answer that was known ahead of time. (Keep the plane level by not moving the controls.)
Suppose the neurons learned to draw a straight line. That was essentially what was being demonstrated here. If you substitute “plane crash” with “line becomes a curve”, it becomes much less exciting, to say the least.
“Isn’t that just learning to set a signal to a constant value?” “Yep” “Will it always become the same constant?” “Yep” “Can’t we already do that?” “Yep”
I was so disillusioned that it took many years to stop believing that academia itself was at fault for misinforming the public so badly. After all, it’s almost two decades later, and people still believe “rat brain flies plane” happened in 2004.
If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself not to worry about it; focus on the academics that are working quietly on the frontier, not the ones trying to raise funding for their lab.
At least the neurons in today’s study actually learned to play something. But if the past is any indication, I’d err on the side of skepticism.