Human Brain Cells on Chip for Sale – First biocomputing platform hits the market

Thanks! Is there more there here now?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909452

The more I read the article the less i believe it . for all we know its just some pig brains smeared on some chip with some creative marketing. Bitcoin and the Music Industry pfft what b/s .

It's all nepo.

If you're in the right circle you can do illegal stuff and it will be brushed off as "the cost of innovation".

If you're in the wrong circle you might get your company shut down because you can only consume up to 500 gallons of water a month unless you apply for a special permit and last month you did 501.5 gallons, or some other crap. And the same people will say "yeah, I know it's a bit harsh but that's the cost of keeping order in society bla bla bla".

The act says you can't sign an agreement for this to happen to a person.

But plenty of incidental material is recovered (e.g. fetal cord blood).

Cadaver tissue is commonly "processed" and then used to make all kinds of medical devices. Bone and tendons are a common example for bone and joint reconstruction surgeries. I can't speak too much to Australia specifically, but because of laws like this in the US these supply chains are setup a specific wah. A good example is Allosource in Colorado. The donations are donations, in return the persons final expenses are taken care of. The company that does the processing and reselling is a non-profit. In this case no one person "sells" any part of their or other persons bodies, but the needed medical materials get to the OR.

Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buSR97QeCq8

> “However, the real gift of this technology is not to computer science. Rather, it’s an enabling technology that allows scientists to perform experiments on a little synthetic brain.”

It’s probably not directly mappable in any reasonable way. At least not until a lot more people get their hands on it and explore the possibilities.

Well, it's a flop, so it compares. /s

How about: it's flopPY, every second?

Seriously brains are neither analog nor digital, they use spike-trains. Very comparable to "clockless" digital circuits. To what we use in chips, synchronized tick-based calculation: it's not comparable. Judging by human but especially animal reaction times: one way to quantify it is to say it has about 10000 flop per second. technically the human head has 2 speeds: one type of cells with 1000 synapses, that can calculate about 10 times per second (the "animal brain" or reptile brain, the cortex). And there are cells with 10000 synapses that fire on average 1 time per second (the "human brain", the neocortex), which should be roughly the same capacity. Of this network type it is known that more synapses means more accurate, more long-term planning. Faster firing means faster responses. Reptiles are stupid, but despite reptiles being cold blooded we mammals have zero chance to respond in time to an attack. It's not happening. And yes, cats have a built-in trick that gives them a fighting chance, but is only ever going to work in small animals (you need muscles powerful enough to throw yourself several body lengths into the air, and you need to be small and light enough that you survive being thrown in the air several body lengths without coordination, and land without injury. Both properties that humans, or any animal 1m or bigger will never have. And of course, that reflex is an incredible source of youtube videos)

The problem with spike trains is that it's tough to say if a zero signal means anything. On the one hand, all zeros means the cell isn't using energy, and that is incredibly efficient (nanowatt, not even multiple nanowatts). Everything about your mind is designed to almost always be all zeros. A spike means milliwatt power usage for .15-.2 seconds after the spike. Given the amount of neurons, our brain would rapidly cook itself if the average firing rate even just double, in fact that is exactly what happens with epilepsy patients.

The above calculations only apply if all zeros means the network isn't doing anything. If that assumption is wrong, you should probably multiply those figures with the temporal accuracy of the spikes, which is incredible, 3-4 nanosecond. So you'd have to multiply the figures by 300 million, at which point the human mind still is 1000 times stronger than even a full stargate deployment. That sounds incredible, but it really isn't.

If you want to see incredible figures, figure out how much calculations natural selection does for a simple ocean-based bacterial species (assuming 1 cell division = one calculation, if you assume a more reasonable 1 allele combination = 1 flop, you're another 3-5 orders of magnitude higher). Bacteria do hundreds of orders of magnitude more thinking than all humans combined.

That shows that the author understands nothing about either Bitcoin or neurons.

Is the trilogy any good? Im just about to finish blindsight

> This may be the shortcut to an AI 1,000 smarter than a human.

Well, there are humans, and then, there are former US presidents. I never regarded "Hot Shots" as a documentary, but, i was young, when i first saw it.