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We’re one step closer to reading an octopus’s mind
- asplake 4y agoMeanwhile from the sci-fi department, got to mention the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky
- nozzlegear 4y agoI really enjoyed Children of Time, and I just started the latest entry in the series a couple of days ago. Speaking of octopuses though, I highly recommend The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. It was a riveting read and dealt just as much with artificial intelligence (timely considering all the hubbub around LLMs lately) as it did with the rise of consciousness in octopuses in the near future and how humanity might react to that. I couldn’t put it down.
- entiendo 4y agoThe crow species in Children of Memory definitely reminded me of LLMs…
- nozzlegear 4y agoI thought the same thing. I loved how their species was described as one giant problem solving machine that doesn't really know what it's doing. Also loved Gothy and Gethly's theory of sentience at the end of the book.
- ljlolel 4y agoIf Octopuses could evolve human intelligence and society in just a few generations, then why wouldn’t they have done so in the hundreds of millions of years before? Hint: they must have
- jetbalsa 4y agoThere is a sci-fi book that covered this a little, its the Children of Time series, rather good look into a "uplift" virus going wrong. (used in Children of Ruin, the second in the series on Octopuses)
- ninjanomnom 4y agoOne of the longest lived octopus species we know of has a lifespan of about 5 years, even if they were more intelligent than humans they'd have a hard time establishing a society only being able to establish 5 years worth of knowledge per individual. Let's make longevity treatments for octopi and see if they learn enough to make/join society.
- ljlolel 4y agoAirplane with bullet holes meme. Think it through: If a long lived social octopus species regularly evolved and made civilization that collapsed its species, then the only similar species left would be one that is absurdly solitary and absurdly short lived. Think about it. Evolution is counterintuitive.
- maegul 4y agoI’d even go so far as to say that human civilisation struggles with the longevity of humans. We’re rather short lived compared to the impacts our actions can have, as a technologically enabled and socially civilised species. Life really is short. If our lifespan were twice or ten times longer, the whole thing would be a different ballgame.
- asplake 4y agoPurchased the audiobook, thanks!
- wrycoder 4y agoWhich one?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tired_star_nrg 4y agoEvery day we get closer to making this onion article a reality: https://clickhole.com/the-future-is-here-elon-musk-stuck-a-guitar-cable-in-a-dolphins-brain-and-had-carlos-santana-play-a-solo-into-it-and-the-dolphin-died-instantly/ https://clickhole.com/the-future-is-here-elon-musk-stuck-a-g...
- ghoogl 4y ago[dead]
- 7373737373 4y agoI HIGHLY recommend this talk from the HotChips conference "HC29-K1: The Direct Human/Machine Interface and Hints of a General Artificial Intelligence", specifically the next 4 minutes after this timestamp: https://youtu.be/PVuSHjeh1Os?t=1168 https://youtu.be/PVuSHjeh1Os?t=1168 Also this: "Flashes of Insight: Whole-Brain Imaging of Neural Activity in the Zebrafish" https://youtu.be/eKkaYDTOauQ https://youtu.be/eKkaYDTOauQ
- sdwr 4y agoIncredible! And like he said, AI has big potential to decode or interop.
- tough 4y ago[flagged]
- mysterydip 4y agoProbably "swim, swim, hungry" http://dopefish.com/fishinfo.html http://dopefish.com/fishinfo.html
- perihelions 4y agoI wonder what would happen if you prompted an LLM with something other than human language, like a large upload of patterns from a cephalopod brain. Could it translate concepts?
- toss1 4y agoIt'll be cool when we get there!! But, considering that the most massive LLMs do not even attempt to abstract and manipulate even basic concepts (they just model likely sequences of words using insanely large data sets), that would be a definitive "No.". Plus, the fact that we have no idea how to map even human neural activity patterns to concepts, also "No.", it'd be even harder to figure out the octopus' conceptual map.
- zffr 4y agoWhy not? LLM convert words into vectors and then discover relationships between them. If it is possible to convert brain patterns into vectors, I can see how an LLM could detect patterns between those too. Converting the brain pattern vectors back to words could be difficult, but might be possible if each brain pattern vector was annotated with a description of the organism's current environment and the organism's current actions.
- iamerroragent 4y agoI'm curious when you say LLM convert words in to vectors, is it similar to vectors in physics, with one part being a magnitude and the other part being a direction?
- jesse_cureton 4y agoIt's similar - basically here a vector/tensor is an array of magnitudes across N dimensions. Whereas in (undergrad-level) physics you might have a 3- or 4-D vector for spatial dimensions and time, here the LLMs are embedding sequences of tokens into N-dimensional space where N is much much larger. There's a pattern called "embedding search" - you precalculate a set of embeddings for a corpus of text. Then to do a search, you calculate embeddings for your search string. Then you can find the closest vector in that N-dimensional space, which finds you the semantically closest neighbor from the original corpus. For an embedding search - the OpenAI Embeddings API gives you a ~1500 dimension output vector. When a LLM is working with input text as a vector, I am not sure what the tokenizer is actually feeding into the model. Hopefully someone else can chime in!
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoImagine sitting in a river side restaurant, with a pizza fruit del mare, and a octopus in a mobile aquarium rolls, by and starts yelling at you for being a sapient eater then settles down, to order a pizza homo. Singularities are a wild ride.