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Lab-grown ‘mini-brains’ do mimic human brain development
- idiot74 9y agoHow long until we can use these for machine learning?
- pottersbasilisk 9y agoHopefully after some ethics reviews.
- Jtsummers 9y agohttp://www.research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extract2.html http://www.research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extra... Already been done after a fashion 13 years ago. Would be interesting to see what further research has resulted in.
- bbcbasic 9y agoThe differences between man and machine are narrowing. If you grow a smart enough brain, does it (she?) have rights?
- Robotbeat 9y agoAfter Elon Musk's Neuralink figures out a scalable way to interface with neurons. Need probably millions of electrodes, not just a few hundred like we use today. It would be kind of crazy if we develop full AI by literally using brains in vats. But it makes sense (even if it is horrifying). Meat is cheap, and the brain is like an exa-OPS computer running on 20 Watts of power. If you could solve the interface problem and figure out how to actually use it practically, brain is like 6 or 7 orders of magnitude cheaper than the next-cheapest computing substrate. That's like half a century of Moore's Law (and Moore's Law is basically over now... much slower pace, at least). (Here's an example using rat neurons: https://singularityhub.com/2010/10/06/videos-of-robot-controlled-by-rat-brain-amazing-technology-still-moving-forward/ https://singularityhub.com/2010/10/06/videos-of-robot-contro... And this one: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a-dish-fly-fighter-plane/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a... )
- adrianN 9y agoBrains are not general purpose computers though. You could probably train lumps of brain tissue do to certain tasks, but putting any kinds of FLOP/s numbers on the label is like stating horse power for levers.
- Robotbeat 9y agoThat's why I said "OPS" instead of FLOPS. The kind of operations that brains are good at are orthogonal to the kinds that computers are good at, so a hybrid approach is probably a good idea. Again, I'm primarily thinking about this for AI type applications, not like fluid dynamics or other applications requiring high precision. EDIT:And technically brains are general computing devices. Just really inefficient ones. Emulating logic in wetware is highly inefficient (and usually requires an external memory device, like pen and paper, though pure wetware memory also works in some especially skilled individuals, although still with severe capacity limitations). Of course, emulating wetware in logic isn't terribly efficient, either.
- shrimp_emoji 9y agoHowever, wetware still ages, gets diseases, needs life support, and is fairly non-serviceable. If I could pick what platform I run on, it'd be hardware (and I hope such hardware eventually comes along).
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoSure. But if they're cheap to grow, just make more. "Cattle, not pets." (I do realize the pretty horrific undertones of this discussion.)
- kpil 9y agoWhile dead brains might be cheaper than electronic, I doubt that growing neurons in a lattice and doing what you want will ever be. There is some research going on in using spintronics for neural network, and I think that both density and power usage would be a fraction of a biological system. There is probably a long way until we can emulate human brains, but for generic neutral networks, I think electronics or spintronics is the probable route.
- poslathian 9y agoThis is looking increasingly likely - here's a recent nature paper showing these organoids are electrically active, recording spikes from a dense 256ch electrode. That team also was able stimulate optogenetically yielding bidirectional communication with an organoid - http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature22047.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu... Another interesting paper demonstrating that neural tissues can be effectively grown around mesh electrodes, providing both a scaffolding function as well a recording and stimulation functions. http://faculty.engr.utexas.edu/xie/xie/publications/ultraflexible-nanoelectronic-probes-form-reliable-glial-scar%E2%80%93free-neural http://faculty.engr.utexas.edu/xie/xie/publications/ultrafle... Neuroscience has been rapidly leveling up recently, its increasingly believable that high bandwidth bidirectional neural interfaces (at the cellular level) are on the horizon. DARPA was pitching this a few years ago (NESD) and it was pretty far out, but now see Kernel and Neuralink and the 10 or so companies partnered in to those efforts mostly-successfully developing all kinds of technologies required by this roadmap (disclosure: including my own).
- petra 9y ago>> believable that high bandwidth bidirectional neural interfaces (at the cellular level) are on the horizon. This means getting inside the brain, right ? do you see it happening for regular brain augmentation, and not just serious medical issues?
- azeirah 9y ago:|
- gm-conspiracy 9y agoThis is over a decade old (not sure if you consider it ML): http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/brain.dish/ http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/02/brain.dish/ [edit] didn't see the UF link below.
- luminiferous 9y agoIs that even "machine" learning anymore?
- hexscrews 9y agoCellular substrates are just a different kind of machine platform.
- milesvp 9y agoSome years ago (9+) Professor DeMarse published some papers on training petri dish brains cells how to "fly a plane" (or more appropriately "keep a simulated plane from crashing"). I have a copy of the paper at home, but can't think of the title, (it was kind of hard to find a copy since it wasn't publicly available online). You might look at what his lab is currently working on though. http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/ http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/
- hacker_9 9y agoTitle is an exaggeration, all they found was structures that looked similar to structures in our brains. They have no idea what these structures actually do, and even said there is huge amount of variability in the structures. As an aside, this: "They first froze the mini-brains and cut them into ultra-thin sections, which they mounted onto glass slides. They then labeled the sections with different combinations of colored fluorescent tags that are specific to certain cell types, and imaged the sections using an automated scanner." Shows just how immature the neurobiology field is. I imagine that slicing, and then manually re connecting the slices in a 3d program, must be a pretty painstaking process. Not to mention you are left with no idea how data traveled round the structure. A code analogy would be having a huge codebase handed to you in little chunks, and you have to connect up the pieces by hand. And at the end of it, not even being able to debug it and see if things even work as expected.
- agumonkey 9y agoWondering if they ever tried to do input/output testing if that ever makes sense at the cerebral level of complexity.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago> Shows just how immature the neurobiology field is. So then, what is your proposal for improvement?
- strainer 9y agoThis correlation and mapping through ultra thin sections has been recently computerised by 'VAST' and has revealed unexpected nanoscale complexity in neuron connectivity. http://www.psypost.org/2015/07/new-vast-tool-gives-neuroscientists-previously-unachievable-brain-images-at-a-nanoscale-resolution-36291 http://www.psypost.org/2015/07/new-vast-tool-gives-neuroscie...
- hsdistefa 9y agoI worked in a lab where we had a similar problem reconstructing 3d images from manual sections via the same procedure. Not only is it a painstaking process, but some slices are lost due to human error while sectioning and the tissue is mechanically distorted when placed onto the slides (squished between the glass and the cover slip). The solution was simple, albeit much more expensive than sectioning: just MRI scan the organ.
- jlebrech 9y agoput a neural net in those
- balabaster 9y agoWhile I like this at a conceptual level, I'm struggling with it on a personal, perhaps moral level. A real brain, trapped, prisoner in a vat... if it's a real brain, it's going to have some level of sentience, just like the rest of us. Yet it is a slave. This is somewhat horrific to me. AI never really bothered me right up until I read this...
- hacker_9 9y agoSounds like something out of Doctor Who.
- QuantumGravy 9y agoUnseen suffering is non-existent suffering. With no capacity for understanding what, if anything, another brain is experiencing, it's easy to rationalize and dismiss. That goes for fully formed humans as much as lab experiments.
- balabaster 9y ago"It's a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark" - Nelson
- QuantumGravy 9y agoEvery few years, there are incidents of miners trapped underground, with herculean efforts to free the survivors. Each time, I ponder whether there have been similar tragedies, in some corrupt society, where the mine is bulldozed over, any survivors left to die alone in the darkness, none ever knowing of their suffering.
- LeeHwang 9y agoYea. I have the same concerns. If this tech evolves, I'm really worried about brain harvesting or trafficking, we already have increasingly desperate people turning to organ trafficking, and human smuggling is tied to organ harvesting. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-trafficking-idUSKBN17S1V8 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-traff... https://www.decodedscience.org/organ-harvesting-human-trafficking-black-market/56966 https://www.decodedscience.org/organ-harvesting-human-traffi...
- dkarapetyan 9y agoGetting spooky and ethically tricky.