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Analog is especially useful for neural networks, where small and cheap matters and you can deal with the “errors” through training and backpropagation. Human b

Analog is especially useful for neural networks, where small and cheap matters and you can deal with the “errors” through training and backpropagation. Human brains are inherently analog…as evidenced by the fact that thinking becomes much more precise after a cup of coffee. Analog effect.

bgroat 5y ago
I was waiting for someone to bring up human brains. I'm reading Dune now, and much of the HN-crowd that in the Duniverse they don't have computers because of a past AI war. What's a little bit less known is that one of the factions in the universe (The Bene Tleilax) actually dabbled with building computers in within the time-span of the narrative. They concluded that it just wasn't worth it. Trained human intellects (augmented with spice) were just better. Now, obviously we don't have access to spice in our reality... but we also aren't doing FTL travel calculations. So maybe we don't need it
- jerf 5y ago
  Recall that Dune was published in 1965. It took a bold science fiction author to predict the degree that computers would advance even in the 1980s (Nueromancer, 1984, for instance), and it wouldn't fully penetrate scifi for quite a while. Prior to that you'd get a lot of things called "computers" but had very strange performance characteristics. One of my favorites in hindsight is Asimov's Robot series. This is a universe where the Eniac flashing-light-style computer is the height of computing technology, but we can build sentient, human-class brains to stick in robots, and occasionally use outside of robots. A very, very weird technology landscape if you think about it for a while. In isolation, there's a lot of interesting-in-hindsight "hits" in scifi that predict this or that aspect of the modern computerized world, but in totality I'd say the power computers have, the speed with which they acquired them, and their widespread availability was a "miss" for science fiction. Arguably they were even a little late to the party, having to see some of these come from real engineered products before they started showing up in stories. But I don't really criticize them for it... rationally and abstractly, predicting that much exponential advance across that many fronts of performance was arguably not a smart bet. It happened, so it's true, but even in hindsight I'm not sure I could prove that it was some sort of inevitability that everyone should have seen coming. In 1965, it would still be possible to believe that humans, especially bred for the task for a few thousand years and augmented with drugs, would outdo computers forever. In 2021, I find the premise less compelling. I don't care how you try to arrange it, the current people staffing AWS couldn't themselves replace AWS, not even with hundreds of years of breeding for the purpose and a steady feed of drugs. Too many exaFLOPS.
Maursault 5y ago
> Human brains are inherently analog No they're not inherently analog. If they were, thinking of a bird would produce the analog of a bird within the brain, and this definitely does not occur. The brain is neither analog nor digital, but includes a signal processing paradigm that has properties of both. Signals sent through and around the brain are either/or states that are similar to binary. A neuron fires or it does not. These pulses are the most basic language of the brain, and they're all or nothing, so the brain is computing using something like binary signals. But biochemical pathways are similar to analog. Neurons also perform internal electrical signal integration in analog. But the spatiotemporal pulses of neural code looks a lot like digital signaling.
- jerf 5y ago
  Analog and analogical have diverged and aren't the same anymore, despite the implicit claims of the video. "Analog" now simply means "not digital". You can build analog computers that are not analogical, especially if you're an engineer just trying to do a job and don't mind hybridizing in some digital as needed. Analog now just means "not digital".
- hasmanean 5y ago
  Ok it’s mixed signal.

bgroat 5y ago

I was waiting for someone to bring up human brains. I'm reading Dune now, and much of the HN-crowd that in the Duniverse they don't have computers because of a past AI war. What's a little bit less known is that one of the factions in the universe (The Bene Tleilax) actually dabbled with building computers in within the time-span of the narrative. They concluded that it just wasn't worth it. Trained human intellects (augmented with spice) were just better. Now, obviously we don't have access to spice in our reality... but we also aren't doing FTL travel calculations. So maybe we don't need it

jerf 5y ago
Recall that Dune was published in 1965. It took a bold science fiction author to predict the degree that computers would advance even in the 1980s (Nueromancer, 1984, for instance), and it wouldn't fully penetrate scifi for quite a while. Prior to that you'd get a lot of things called "computers" but had very strange performance characteristics. One of my favorites in hindsight is Asimov's Robot series. This is a universe where the Eniac flashing-light-style computer is the height of computing technology, but we can build sentient, human-class brains to stick in robots, and occasionally use outside of robots. A very, very weird technology landscape if you think about it for a while. In isolation, there's a lot of interesting-in-hindsight "hits" in scifi that predict this or that aspect of the modern computerized world, but in totality I'd say the power computers have, the speed with which they acquired them, and their widespread availability was a "miss" for science fiction. Arguably they were even a little late to the party, having to see some of these come from real engineered products before they started showing up in stories. But I don't really criticize them for it... rationally and abstractly, predicting that much exponential advance across that many fronts of performance was arguably not a smart bet. It happened, so it's true, but even in hindsight I'm not sure I could prove that it was some sort of inevitability that everyone should have seen coming. In 1965, it would still be possible to believe that humans, especially bred for the task for a few thousand years and augmented with drugs, would outdo computers forever. In 2021, I find the premise less compelling. I don't care how you try to arrange it, the current people staffing AWS couldn't themselves replace AWS, not even with hundreds of years of breeding for the purpose and a steady feed of drugs. Too many exaFLOPS.

Maursault 5y ago

> Human brains are inherently analog No they're not inherently analog. If they were, thinking of a bird would produce the analog of a bird within the brain, and this definitely does not occur. The brain is neither analog nor digital, but includes a signal processing paradigm that has properties of both. Signals sent through and around the brain are either/or states that are similar to binary. A neuron fires or it does not. These pulses are the most basic language of the brain, and they're all or nothing, so the brain is computing using something like binary signals. But biochemical pathways are similar to analog. Neurons also perform internal electrical signal integration in analog. But the spatiotemporal pulses of neural code looks a lot like digital signaling.

jerf 5y ago
Analog and analogical have diverged and aren't the same anymore, despite the implicit claims of the video. "Analog" now simply means "not digital". You can build analog computers that are not analogical, especially if you're an engineer just trying to do a job and don't mind hybridizing in some digital as needed. Analog now just means "not digital".
hasmanean 5y ago
Ok it’s mixed signal.