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> 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
by com2kid 4y ago
> 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!)
- m463 4y agoI think we ARE nature, organically adapting whatever tool or advantage we find and putting it to use.
- stareatgoats 4y ago> 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).
- ekkodal 4y agoDo you remember the name of the novel? Sounds like a fun read :)
- jacquesm 4y agoI 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.
- jumhyn 4y agoIt’s not quite self-driving cars but Snow Crash has a very similar plot detail.
- pmoriarty 4y agoChatGPT'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".
- com2kid 4y agoIt 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.
- tinus_hn 4y agoThe 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.
- bsaul 4y agoit 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
- bee_rider 4y agoI 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?
- nextaccountic 4y agoThis is kind of the reverse of the plot of the Talos Principle
- version_five 4y agoI'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.
- wwalexander 4y agoThis 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.
- yed 4y agoDo 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-executive-meddling-the-cause-of-humans-as-batteries-in-the-matrix https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...
- nextaccountic 4y agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35069121 Anyway this will remain in my headcanon, simply because the whole thing makes no sense otherwise