This is a really good point. Would be a fascinating read if someone were to collect all those examples and explore that a bit.
But in itself, that was not the point. It would also transform the owner or user -- it was a hermetic symbol, a mechanical means to "pierce the veil" and to see the deep mystical and magical truths, the Real Reality. It was immanent, a thing in the world, that enabled the transcendent, to go beyond, above, outside of the world. Its discovery would have been the single most important moment in the history of the world, the moment in which humans had a reliable road to divinity.
Hmm. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
But out of alchemy came modern chemistry, and also some parts of the scientific method. After all, as some smart people worked out, you could systematically try all the permutations of materials that your reading had suggested as possibilities. That meant measuring, weighing, mixing properly, keeping detailed notes. Fundamental lab work is the unglamorous slab of concrete beneath the shining houses of the physical sciences. There were waves of hysteria and hype, but after each, something useful would be left behind, minus the sheen of unlimited dreams.
Hmm. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
These days it is possible for a device to transmute base metals into gold. But the operators have not, so far as I can deduce, ascended to any higher planes of existence. They have eschewed the ethereal and remained reliably corporeal.
I'm not sure the reference you are making. Red pill/blue pill? I wasn't aware of the symbolism in the Philosopher's Stone.
> But the operators have not, so far as I can deduce, ascended to any higher planes of existence.
I guess I'm unfamiliar with this non-literal aspect to the philosopher's stone.
I'm missing the allusions you are making. To ascend to higher planes of existence, no need for AGI, some acid will do.
> Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning
> Neuroscientists have long criticised deep learning algorithms as incompatible with current knowledge of neurobiology. We explore more biologically plausible versions of deep representation learning, focusing here mostly on unsupervised learning but developing a learning mechanism that could account for supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. The starting point is that the basic learning rule believed to govern synaptic weight updates (Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity) arises out of a simple update rule that makes a lot of sense from a machine learning point of view and can be interpreted as gradient descent on some objective function so long as the neuronal dynamics push firing rates towards better values of the objective function (be it supervised, unsupervised, or reward-driven). The second main idea is that this corresponds to a form of the variational EM algorithm, i.e., with approximate rather than exact posteriors, implemented by neural dynamics. Another contribution of this paper is that the gradients required for updating the hidden states in the above variational interpretation can be estimated using an approximation that only requires propagating activations forward and backward, with pairs of layers learning to form a denoising auto-encoder. Finally, we extend the theory about the probabilistic interpretation of auto-encoders to justify improved sampling schemes based on the generative interpretation of denoising auto-encoders, and we validate all these ideas on generative learning tasks.
And so has every other big idea that didn't become reality, and that was the majority. Again, I have no problem with AI research whatsoever, but the prose was still eyebrow-raising considering the actual state of affairs.
> They are very similar.
They are not. The main role of NNs is learning, which they still mostly do pretty much with backpropagation gradient-descent (+ heuristics). The brain does not learn with backpropagation.