Hacker News Reader

Comment by com2kid | Hacker News Reader

> Rat brain experiments

One of the more off the wall sci-fi ideas I saw was a pulp sci-fi novel that had dog brains being used for self driving cars.

The idea stuck with me that maybe sometimes we should give up on optimizing nature and just go along with nature.

Of course neural networks are very much inspired by nature, but since Rosenblatt's time, science has learned that brains are even more complex than previously imagined (and no one ever though brains were simple!)

View on HN

This was the original concept behind the Matrix, but ‘90s studio execs thought the average person wouldn’t understand and made the humans just be “batteries” instead which makes much less sense.

Do you have a reference for this? In interviews I read the Wachowskis defended the whole “batteries” explanation, which lessened my opinion of them.

Edit: found a pretty good reference for it being true: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...

I repeated this in HN too, someone asked for a source and I found out this appears to be false

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35069121

Anyway this will remain in my headcanon, simply because the whole thing makes no sense otherwise

The original story for The Matrix had the machines use the humans as AI computing devices, not power sources (which doesn’t make a lot of sense). It just turned out too difficult to explain to the viewers.

it would probably be a good rewrite. machines confronting people to situations and puzzle to solve, train them in specials rooms, then wiring their brains to real-world machines..

I imagine today's people will understand it

I really expected the answer to be that humans just screwed up the world too much, the machines were created to help us, and eventually decided the best way to help us did not necessarily require our consent.

They even mention switching the simulation from a sort of garden-of-Eden because people reject too comfortable an environment.

Human brain as a compute device… might make sense as an accelerator for certain communication or approximate spacial reasoning tasks?

This is kind of the reverse of the plot of the Talos Principle

I think we ARE nature, organically adapting whatever tool or advantage we find and putting it to use.

> I think we ARE nature

Agree. But will the future autonomous and from humans totally independent AI with self-encoded self-preservation and agency be nature too? I'm inclined to say yes, if we are able to expand our definition of nature just a bit to include non-biological life forms (of which there might be many already, we just haven't noticed).

I've often thought (in the sci-fi sense) about the idea of distilling down to the core of what only a brain can do that a turing machine cannot, and then hooking up say a fruit fly brain to perform this "brain" function organically, while the rest is augmented with traditional computation.

Do you remember the name of the novel? Sounds like a fun read :)

I remember reading that and took a 1/2 hour to find it but so far no luck. It may have been a short story. Searching for it is hard because somehow 'Sally' by Asimov keeps popping up but that has nothing to do with it.

It’s not quite self-driving cars but Snow Crash has a very similar plot detail.

ChatGPT's answer:

The novel you might be referring to is "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick. In this novel, there are self-driving cars called "hovercars" that are powered by organic artificial intelligence, including dog brains. The novel has been adapted into the movie "Blade Runner".

Is this true that DADOES have this in it, because I've no such recollection (though it was decades ago I read it).

GPT4 doesn't even try to give an answer, which is +1 for not imagining things. :D

It was some not-very-good pulp sci-fi book audio book that my phone apparently forgot I ever checked out.

I honestly don't remember anything about the plot of the book except for flying cars and dog brains. It wasn't by Philip K Dick though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com