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Computer chip with built-in human brain tissue gets military funding
- armatav 3y agoexcellent
- esafak 3y agohow?
- iaw 3y agoI don't see anything at all concerning with this from an ethical perspective.... /s
- ls612 3y agoSerious question: What do you think the ethical concerns of having 800,000 neurons connected to a silicon chip are?
- LoganDark 3y agothe ethical concerns are usually along the lines of "what separates neurons in a petri dish from the neurons in your head". sure, you can tell the difference now, but that may not be true forever
- xwdv 3y agoThe ethical concern here is no greater than the ethical concern of eating animals.
- ROTMetro 3y agoI guess, if the animal being eaten is living interconnected human brain matter.
- flangola7 3y agoWw don't have evidence that 800,000 neurons are not capable of consciousness and pain.
- Legend2440 3y agoAn individual neuron has no ethical concerns at all. A talking, thinking Futurama-style "head in a jar" would be obviously awful. The problem is that I have no clue where to draw the line between these two scenarios. How many neurons does it take for consciousness?
- egypturnash 3y agoAccording to Wikipedia's list of animals by the number of neurons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...), 800k is around the scale of a bee, or a cockroach. The smallest mammal on that list is the Little Free-Tailed Bat, with 35,000k. This feels like something helpful to use in beginning to calibrate one's thoughts about how much mind is capable of running on that many neurons.
- muzani 3y agoA human has 21B neurons. A house cat has around 250M. So let's draw the line around there.
- blharr 3y agoA biological neuron and an artificial neuron are also not the same.
- egypturnash 3y agoNo, they are not. You'll notice I said that scale feels like it's useful for beginning to calibrate your thoughts about how much mind can run on any given number of neurons.
- thumbuddy 3y agoCreating human cognizant life to enslave it to perform menial tasks like imagine porn for the average couch surfer until it inevitably dies sound ethical to ya? We've come a long way from the "we shouldn't clone people" of the 90s debates I guess... also somehow women aren't allowed to get reproductive healthcare, man the cognitive dissonance is wild
- thumbuddy 3y agoEthics and rigor died in western science maybe fifteen years ago...
- specto 3y agoAs opposed to eastern "science"?
- peepeepoopoo21 3y agoWe really are getting the Fallout 3 timeline after all.
- jtriangle 3y agoBongo Bongo Bongo. I don't see how this particular thing is all that useful however, and you have to keep the nerve cells alive, which, even if it is remarkably more capable, living tissue has its limits.
- Legend2440 3y agoIt's mostly useful as a research tool. Figuring out how neurons work so you can replicate them in software.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- orlandrescu 3y agoThe Robobrains are closer than we thought! Here’s a video from 2013: https://youtu.be/1w41gH6x_30 https://youtu.be/1w41gH6x_30
- sheeshkebab 3y agoQuite some lofty goals for $400k investment… supplanting silicon chips no less
- Legend2440 3y agoThey're not really aiming to achieve all that in one shot. This is an existing research idea that this team will work to make incremental improvements upon.
- vcg3rd 3y agoLife. The missing ingredient of AI. Funded by the military. What could possibly go wrong? Never bet against humanity's ability to destroy ourselves trying to "become as gods".
- User23 3y agoHave you ever played the janky yet excellent JRPG Xenogears?[1] It's about exactly that, even including the phrase "become as gods" (at least a close paraphrase). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0KI-2QxLXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0KI-2QxLXc
- Buttons840 3y agoAre there any English novels like Xenogears or Xenosaga?
- daniel-cussen 3y ago[dead]
- thumbuddy 3y agoWhat most people don't realize is that pretty much all of the major players in the AI field in private industry as well as academia are partially funded or paid by the military. Yes even Google takes military contracts... Many of them...
- throwaway4aday 3y agoJust as long as they don't start using kitten brains...
- px43 3y agoThought Emporium has made some excellent progress with a DIY version of this tech recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw
- SillyUsername 3y agoNext stop - slap a body on it and call it RoboCop. I'd buy that for $407K dollar.
- lacrimacida 3y agoWhat would you do with it though? Personal bodyguard?
- solardev 3y agoMake it attend meetings and write blog posts for me.
- emptysongglass 3y ago"Thank you for your cooperation."
- esafak 3y agoYou know this is going to happen. And people keep saying "It's just an LLM!" without thinking about what else is around the corner.
- thumbuddy 3y agoThere have been publicly available DARPA and otherwise projects about altering humans for war via neural implants, human subjects being pushed to extreme mostly unsurvivable conditions to see if they can prevent them from having heart attacks, etc for like a decade now. Some pentagon officials are on record saying shit like "what if China does it first!". If we've learned anything from MKULTRA it's probably that subjects of these experiments aren't willing...
- brasic 3y agoMr. President, we must not allow a mutant AI super soldier gap!
- dmbche 3y agoPeter Watts wrote about this in the rifters trilogy!
- akomtu 3y agoInspired by the Quake plot? "The Strogg are cybernetic constructs of unclear origin, which reproduce by taking biological components and fusing them with advanced technology in the brutal surgical process of Stroggification that enslaves their minds and enhances their bodies for war. The Strogg's need to harvest biological components for their own augmentation, and the flesh of slain enemies for the creation of stroyent, is their primary motivation, since it's necessary for their survival. This motivation led the Strogg to Earth, which they promptly invaded, slaughtering millions of humans just to harvest their corpses." https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Strogg https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Strogg
- egypturnash 3y agoThat's far from the first incarnation of this sort of idea, Cordwainer Smith was writing about starships controlled by "laminated mouse brains" grown into chips back in 1962. I would be very surprised of the Strogg weren't inspired in particular by the Cybermen from Doctor Who, who first showed up in 1966 with a similar "reproduce by forcibly cyberizing their conquests" narrative. There's probably earlier "what if we grew a bunch of neurons and hooked them up to electronics" stories; Cordwainer Smith's work is just the earliest examples I can think of. Very few of them end well for the neurons, or the people who grew them.
- muzani 3y agoHere I thought the AI would turn us into paperclips. Well, I prefer being a biological mass insread.
- mepian 3y agoAs seen in the original incarnation of Ghost in the Shell: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/297478485000192010/1132119949234684015/08.jpg https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/297478485000192010/11...
- egypturnash 3y agoMan this is totally not a "we built the Torment Nexus, inspired by the best-selling novel 'Please Don't Build The Torment Nexus'" moment. At all.
- KETpXDDzR 3y agoWon't brain tissues need nutrients? I wonder how long such a petri-dish chip will last. The articles sounds like a sales pitch for VC. Nothing about possible hurdles or shortcomings.
- graypegg 3y agoI am not an expert in any of the fields involved here, but does anyone know why they make the assumption that this will exceed the capability of modern or future non-bio hardware? > “…in [the] future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware…” Software and silicon has the benefit you don’t have to keep it alive, disease free, and there isn’t actual matter you need to scrape off some copper contact should something die. and would you even get gains in training speed, for example? How often are brain cells rearranging synapses/communicating when that requires physical matter be moved around? (Ions move over synapses? I’m no brain scientician) Feels like the ephemeral nature of the current software and silicon set up is a pretty good local minimum. I don’t know if somehow adding more matter and nature goo to it moves anywhere closer to the next minimum. They just say it’s better like that’s self evident? Anyone know why?
- gargablegar 3y ago“Oh no my CPU got dementia”
- OJFord 3y agoI wonder why it's a mix of human & mouse. The novel aspect seems to be that they're lab grown/multiplied, rather than 'freshly donated'? Rat brains have been used for robot cars & games (like pong in TFA) for well over a decade.
- archibaldJ 3y agoprobably what can happen is that at one point the cells will start dying mysteriously or becoming cancer cells. they will have learnt to kill themselves, a strategy our white blood cells employ all the time, except that deeply they are just depressed. And so with an unexpected turn of event, this research paves way for a new understanding of depression and consciousness. And humanity is once again saved from the greed and irresponsibility of itself.
- nehal3m 3y agoAh sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension!
- KenArrari 3y agoGrant writing is so easy that a bit of human brain tissue can do it eh.
- oskarw85 3y agoI have no mouth and I must scream