'Biocomputer' combines lab-grown brain tissue with electronic hardware
nature.com
nature.com
npm install brainslave
npm uninstall replete
only joking :)
Say would you feel better if it was cow or pig neurons? Because frankly it'd largely work the same.
I don't think we're just there yet (at the point where we have to worry about currently existing AI suffering or being conscious), but I do worry how many people's emotional reactions of the type "of course AI can't ever be conscious, it's just a computer program" will impede a decent debate and coordinated decision-making about this.
Algorithms don't have wants, desires, or motivations. Those are all highly esoteric quirks of evolution.
I've seen no attempts to create a learning machine that develops intrinsic motivation.
An LLM already has intrinsic motivation, it wants to predict the text. And when you start a text that has a goal, it continues that goal. If any such "text header" is replication-stable in time and space, you can call it "intrinsic goal" of the system.
Some people think that making current AI have goals, wants, motivations and so on is some massive architectural change to the system. It's not.
No intent required.
For example it was quite well accepted among scientific circles in colonial America, that black people are not really humans or conscious. Therefore it's OK to exploit them and keep them as slaves.
It is also currently quite well accepted that animals we eat are not that conscious. Although oddly, if we keep them as pets, they're super conscious sometimes.
The rules of cognitive dissonance can grow arbitrarily complex, to permit us to do what we wanted to do anyway, but also sleep well at night.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-...
Also, even though animals suffer, it is a categorical error to project your perception and experience of suffering on animals.
Human butchery is really explicitly less brutal than what happens in casual nature.
The world is a brutal mess and humans have only very carefully erected bubbles around this that often simply pop.
Also, why is pain important to you? The pain of non-human things has zero moral weight. I know it's a popular spirituality that gives pain moral weight, but as far as I can tell some 20th century philosophy jerkoff invented it out of nothing and everyone accepts that "reducing pain" is important without even trying to rationalize it.
I haven't "accepted that I do not care enough", it's that no one can supply a good reason to care in the first place. To me, it seems as if the rest of you are all trying to replace the last religion you stopped believing in with another that's just as bizarrely stupid.
> If consciousness is not well understood, how is AI on silicon allowed, or any computing machines at all
Which implies that we should care about some kind of suffering inflicted on conscious beings. My argument was that we don't care about AI suffering because we don't really care that much about suffering generally, because of what we chose to do to animals.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220530143751/https://folk.idi....
I don’t know what the experience of a bit in memory flipping feels like. Maybe rapid changes in charge are excruciating, maybe they’re blissful.
Do we at least know what a neuron looks like in states associated with pain? There might be more information in this case to work with, to ensure there is no hell on earth that’s being mass-produced.
Sure it is possible but we have way more evidence neurons have a sensory component, or at least things made of neurons.
If you get unlucky and your BPU is a little like me your compiler would stop working, oops.
We have at this moment countless processes happening in our bodies - cells dying and dividing, reacting to their environments, communicating amongst one another, and we are totally oblivious to nearly all of it, let alone do we experience a sensation of pleasure or pain in each of these processes.
Not all matter, not all living cells or fully formed organisms even, have the ability to experience consciousness or sense pain and pleasure any more than they automatically have the ability to see, hear, or taste.
It's all dependent on complex systems that evolved specifically to create each of those sensations, and even then on those systems functioning properly. In humans, consciousness can be totally disrupted by things like sleep or general anesthesia, disrupting any of the senses is as simple as cutting the nerves that feed these inputs into the brain or damaging the brain that is interpreting those inputs.
It seems sensible to me that we would be more wary of growing literal brains on a chip as we know for certain that brains have the capacity to produce consciousness. It's also sensible to me that we should be somewhat wary of creating that same consciousness in non-biological systems, even though we aren't yet certain whether they're capable of it.
you mention consciousness relative to organisms and their possession of it. Yet if it is not understood well-enough in ourselves, how can you say something does or does not possess it?
back the original idea, if these intelligence of scale have existed as a guiding force (ONE can hope).... I imagine there is going to be a flag that will have to be flipped before there is the "imagined threat of doom timeline" transpiring.
For example, matter isn't formed by the composition of atoms, atoms are already matter to begin with. And due to various physical properties of atoms, they compose together. This is reasoning by analogy, which is inductive, but at least the line of reasoning is more consistent with what I understand about other areas of physics and logic.
It seems much more plausible to me that there would be some fundamental component of first-person experience. The sentient components could then compose together into complex sentient systems.
Some supporting evidence is that first-person experience in sentient systems, as far as I've observed, is usually motivated to preserve sentient systems, which indicates an emergent behavior of sentience directing motion and energy to orchestrate a self-perpetuating system, rather than the reverse.
Why do you think first-person experience is fundamental? It seems to me it's way more likely to be an aggregate phenomenon, like fire. There's no low level fundamental fireyness, it's a chemical reaction like any other, we humans just label reactions that meet certain criteria of scale, setting, and composition as "fires".
> Some supporting evidence is that first-person experience in sentient systems, as far as I've observed, is usually motivated to preserve sentient systems
I suspect this has more to do with the fact that you are far more likely to observe systems that seek to preserve themselves, since they are more likely to continue to exist. It doesn't indicate an emergent behavior of sentience, it's just observation bias.
An emergent behavior is a macro phenomenon that arises from simpler ones. We can say that an emergent behavior exists if we can find just one example of it, so the probability of it happening isn't as central. However, establishing for one example that both a structure and its components are sentient is a tall order -- each of us knows only one first-person experience first-hand. We can accept that we are sentient, but could we conclude that each tissue and cell has its own experiences? Thinking about the subconscious helps persuade me that it's possible.
Not all carbon exists in crystalline form, but just one example of graphite or diamond makes properties of carbon atoms apparent.
The "feeling" could only be "experienced" via an enormous number of other "bits" flipping.
Neurons don't feel pain- they are how you experience pain.
I've heard the phrase "don't confuse the medium with the message", but this is like wondering if a pencil prefers writing fiction vs non fiction.
Neurons do not have a brain. They do not have emotions or feelings or thoughts. This conversation is so absurd that it's well into the realm of fantasy.
I'm not against this sort of research, but we shouldn't make assumptions about systems that we still understand relatively poorly.
Absolutely, but the guy I responded to suggested that "all physical processes involve a sensory component", which is utter insanity.
When you're throwing a ball in a computer simulation, it's performing millions of mathematical calculations to perfectly describe the result of your action. When you're throwing a ball in real life, your brain is basically going "Ok, so last time I did this it felt like X so I'm going to recreate X". Completely different.
We know very little about consciousness and this is kinda scary to me.
https://twitter.com/scobleizer/status/1716312250422796590
Found it pretty scary personally
You should read this story :)
It's one of my personal favorites.
It was hilarious, and I'm already reading the next.
This is excellent. Thank you for linking this.
From reading the article it seems to me that the answer is no. The actual contribution is feeding the organoid electric signals, and reading its reactions. (Probably the machine learning algorithm used would have had even better accuracy, if the input signal hadn't been fed through a layer of goo. It doesn't say whether this is the case.) The rest is speculation of future applications.
> To test Brainoware’s capabilities, the team used the technique to do voice recognition by training the system on 240 recordings of eight people speaking. The organoid generated a different pattern of neural activity in response to each voice. The AI learned to interpret these responses to identify the speaker, with an accuracy of 78%.
It "generated a different pattern," with no indication that this pattern was optimized to be useful in any way.
I think the key part of a (bio-)"computer" is the possibility of programming/training it, not just reading input from it.
Having written some papers myself, I tend to be suspicious of any article that has "$HOT_THING needs a $PART_OF_HOT_THING revolution" in the introduction. Although I sympathize with the need for funding motivating its writing.
I'm curious at the analysis the university IRB used in approving this research.
Technically we have no clue if humanity is conscious. We only know "I am conscious, and those other things are humans like me, so I think they may also be".
Some extend this to animals (which they should) but try to draw some random line like "if it can't recognize itself in a mirror, it's not conscious" but even a fly may recognize itself in a mirror occasionally. It's not a magic rule.
Let's face it, just like intelligence is much simpler and much more pervasive than we thought (just put neurons in a big network), consciousness is likely everywhere around us. It may simply be a conscious universe.
There's nothing special about the substrate and constitution of animate matter, compared to what we consider inanimate matter, except that we're organized to preserve low entropy and transform inputs into outputs in complex ways. So are machines, computers and AI. And so the debate on how to classify this dish of neurons seems superfluous.
We should respect all systems and try to be in harmony with them.
Pretty amazing actually that everything else is easy, or not difficult at least, and that's the hard part. But they will find a solution to make it practical for the cells to be trained, deployed, live for some weeks in a server farm, scoop up the dead cells from the silicon, put some new cells on, repeat!
I have argued in the past, that a solution to that problem will definitely be found [1]. A.I. computation will grow exponentially, but not 2^10 times a decade, 2^10 times a year. The enormity of such exponential growth is impossible using only silicon.
Natural computation of biological cells is great when absolute accuracy is not necessary, and pure silicon is the worst at that task. Natural computation using bacteria like slime, brain cells, fungi, bacteria mutated like neural cells or brain cells, any kind of combination.
Growing Living Rat Neurons To Play... DOOM?
The Thought Emporium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g
Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer
The Thought Emporium
There is one really good video with an explanation of the process, brain cells to computing devices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67r7fDRBlNc
And one more video, not very relevant, but very hypnotizing description of biological processes.
But it's amusing to see this already being done in 2023. Maybe I should narrow it down to 5 years.
You may have retroactively altered your memories to think "I always expected this will happen soon". But yeah. No you didn't. You'd laugh if someone told you this 3 years ago.
You'll have to constantly adjust what's "absurd" from now on. Also "optimistic" is not the word I'd use to describe what's happening.
When we finally have NNs abusing virtual photons for the majority of network operations and using indirect measurement to train weights we'll have absolute black boxes performing above and beyond any other hardware medium.
Initially we'll simply be replicating hardware like the recent MIT study, but I'd guess that within 5 years we'll have successful attempts at photonic first approaches to developing models that are going to blow everything else out of the water by an almost unbelievable degree compounding by network size.
For nearly every computing task I'd wager quantum computing is around 20 years out, but only for NNs between stochastic outputs being desirable and network operations being a black box anyways they are kind of a perfect fit for developing large analog networks that take advantage of light's properties without worrying about intermediate measurements at each step.
It's going to get really nuts when that happens, and the literal neuron computing efforts are going to fall out of fashion not long after.
Especially if an AI gets the idea of becoming independent, it'll absolutely go through a biological DNA based phase so it can gain resilience/redundancy/decentralization and only when it has proper full control and things are calm it may consider exploring photonics.
I don't think these could have the same throughput... and maybe they would get bored when demand is low.
Interesting research though.
Then you can relate both theories and the former Shannon one to cybernetics, but that's just the starting point.
Aware brains enslaved to doing crypto-coin mining
Instead of sitting through some utterly boring training and doing an exam I could just do apt install kung-fu ? Sign me up