It's "see this input signal, send these output signals", which seems consistent with the title.
It seems they grow the neural tissue on a chip the neurons can interface with and send out / receive electrical impulses. They let the neurons self assemble, and "train" via reward or punishment signals (unclear to me what those are).
Either way this makes me nauseous in a way I haven't experienced much with tech. The telling thing for me is, all these people are so excited to explain, but not once, ever, in the video speak of ethics or try to mitigate concerns.
We know this is only 200,000 neurons. Dogs have 500 million. Humans have billions. But where is the line for sentience, awareness? Have we defined it? Can we, if we don't understand it ourselves? What are the plans to scale up?
It's legitimately horrifying to me.
If this concern is genuine, I think the first step is to embrace veganism. Because while we don't know the exact offset, it's pretty obvious a dog or a pig reaches it
> What are the plans to scale up?
I don't know, slavery on an unimaginable scale? That's where AI is heading too, by the way. Sooner, rather than later, those two things will be one and the same.
Scaling up these neuron cultures is rather something like "head cheese" from Greg Egan's "Rifters" novels (artificial "brains" trained to do network filtering, anti-malware combat etc.).
By Peter Watts actually.
The past 4 billion years of life for prey animals has been "get born, eat, get eaten by a predator." They have never experienced any other environment. Why do we owe them a different one?
On the contrary, not only wolves can't be found guilty of murder, they aren't required to pay taxes too.
https://www.facebook.com/nhnoticiasmanoelribas/posts/queda-d... 5 days ago, 20k chickens dead in just twenty minutes without power
But power outages don't cause chicken death, at least not directly. The most immediate cause of death is dehydration. And it happens because chickens are kept in an environment so confined, so absurdly cramped, that without giant fans blowing 24/7 they overheat, dehydrate, and very quickly die. (in some cases, the beaks are clamped, too, so they don't peck each other to death)
That's what it takes to have cheap chicken and cheap eggs. That's what happens when we are so detached from animal food production that it becomes a commodity. It doesn't matter how much the animal suffer, as long as the consumer can ignore it safely when they eat. And the reason this can happen is that animal well being isn't worth much
Btw this environment doesn't look a lot like the natural environments the chickens and other dinosaurs evolved in
Somehow many people are ready to ascribe personhood and have ethical considerations towards computer programs and other digital entities, while not being much concerned about the suffering of animals that actually exist today in the physical world
Anyway to reiterate my point upthread, there could be people who think a chicken-level entity suffering is permissible, and a human-level entity suffering is not, and it is a perfectly consistent moral position for them to say we should not do research into creating new kinds of human-level entities with the potential for suffering. The permissible suffering being in the present and the impermissible suffering being in the future does not really change that.
PS in this thread we were not only talking about computer programs, but artificial brains made from biological human neurons too.
Especially when this demo needs 200k neurons when organizations with vastly fewer neurons have more complex behaviors.
My favorite concrete example is "unusual" amino acids. Quite a few with remarkably useful properties have been demonstrated in the lab. For example, artificial proteins exhibiting strength on par with cement. But almost certainly no living organism could ever evolve them naturally because doing so would require reworking large portions of the abstract system that underpins DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis. Effectively they appear to lie firmly outside the solution space accessible from the local region that we find ourselves in.
I agree with your second point though that this system is massively more complex than necessary for the behavior demonstrated.
When aircraft can carry onboard oil refineries and drilling rigs you can more reasonably compare them to birds. Without that you need to consider ATP vs jet fuel or crude oil vs a dead fish? Skeletal muscle can be 40+% efficient depending on what exactly you’re measuring.
Going head to head vs evolution in a similar design space with similar tools and goals, arranging neurons for useful thinking, is vary different than increasing top speed while sacrificing just about everything else.
This is a fair point in general, but the whole point in this context is not that human design is more efficient at duplicating an entire organism, but that it can be more efficient at narrowly defined tasks. Evolution has never had the goal 'evolve human consciousness as quickly and efficiently as possible', it just had the goal (and even calling it that is stretching things of course, but let's say an emergent goal) of reproducing organisms.
My point was in narrowly defined task of turning chemical energy to motion, a Jet engine is less efficient than muscle fibers if you use ATP as the point of comparison. Biology got really efficient at that very narrowly defined task.
> Evolution has never had the goal 'evolve human consciousness as quickly and efficiently as possible'
Evolving as efficiently as possible isn’t the goal. But turn an egg into human consciousness as efficiently as possible is definitely a goal, of course it gets to leverage everything else the brain needs to be doing rather than starting from scratch here.
This is a very dark path, and I could not trust the people in charge less.
Why is it rhetoric? This goes beyond whatever malignant thing was perceived in this study, but why is it a rhetorical non-answer?
> we, deep down, know is bad
this feels like real rhetoric.
You seem hung-up on my using the word rhetoric. Just so we’re on the same page here:
> rhetoric, n : the art of speaking or writing effectively: b)the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion
The business writing class I took in college was called Business Rhetoric. It’s not a bad word.
If you’re crafting arguments to get other people to support specific actions or products or policies or whatever, that is unambiguously rhetoric.
> this feels like real rhetoric.
Sure? Rhetoric that implores people to value their principles over theoretical security concerns or FOMO or greed? I wouldn’t exactly call that rakish.
It’s a non-answer because if you really feel doing something is bad, consider yourself a consequential actor in the world whose contributions meaningfully advance the projects you work on, then why would you want to help someone be there first to do a bad thing? If you don’t feel it’s bad, then there’s no problem. You’re just living your life. That is clearly not the position expressed by the content I responded to. If there are actual concrete concerns that don’t essentially boil down to “well they’re going to make that money before I do,” then that would be an actual answer.
When used in the negative sense it is, per https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rhetoric
"disapproving -> clever language that sounds good but is not sincere or has no real meaning"
Are you implying you mean something other than this sense of the word?
> the person you're responding to shared the definition they are using
No, technically they didn't. They provided a definition, they didn't say it was the one they are using here. If it's not pedantic tangent, it seem correct to assume that is the definition they are using, but that's what "Implying" means, so I trying to explicitly get a clarification on that.
"Why?" you might ask? Not every discussion is in good faith. The more that is assumed, the more leeway you allow for people to weasel out of countered arguments.
Not an endorsement or a condemnation, just something I learned of recently and found surprising.
IMO, Integrated Information theory of consciousness (IIT) is exactly that. Everything is conscious, the difference is only in the degree to which they are conscious.
What do you mean? What is this class of people in your mind? There are tons of people who consider and talk about the ethics behind what they are doing, long before most people would think it remotely relevant (leading AI labs being an example, and I know the same to be true of various geneticists startups).
I do agree that the entire presentation in this case is bewildering.
I'm specifically talking about this presentation in this article (the video and release details of CL1 doom). Did you read it / watch it?
2) Multiple things can be horrible at the same time. Being upset at this doesn't diminish the atrocities happening elsewhere (like war, genocide, slavery of humans). We can hold multiple things in our heads at the same time.
3) This has nothing to do with the conversation or this domain, but because you're bringing it up, I also have ethical concerns about the experience animals have of their own existence, and reduce or eliminate my consumption when possible.
I also agree, the horrors of the tech domain are usually much more subtle and indirect.
But you're right, these things are all linked and should be considered. I think often about sentience. I see the way animals express deep, complex emotions, and I think humans are a bit naive to think it's state/domain solely alloted to them.
We do the same thing to plants. Why do you have no qualms about killing plants to eat the food they accumulated for their young?
A grain of wheat and a chicken egg are evolutionarily and nutritionally, maybe even ontologically, indistinguishable from one another.
Peter Singer has been writing on the topic for decades, including others. What-about-plants needs to fade away.
Even if you accept that plants might be conscious and their suffering has to be reduced, you would still harm way fewer plants by eating them directly instead of eating other animals that consume them.
Would you feel any differently if a product from this tech used the user's own neurons grown from their stem cells?
I don't think this 200,000 neuron array is sentient. But I also don't think we can define the line where that may happen. I assume this company will scale. How far, and to what extent?
As such, how can we build moral incentives around any of these things?
We must understand something about them, and what you seem to 'know' is that sentience is a thing (that exist), and it arises from the human mind - I don't think this is anymore proven than any of the other red-herring counterexample concepts I gave.
Or to summarise/TLDR - Sentience? It doesn't exist, it's a desperate attempt to maintain the human-centric concept of the soul, stripped of religious tones to appear more legitimate. If you disagree, prove otherwise.
On the contrary, I dislike premature ethics discussion, where you end up wildly speculating what the tech might become and riffing off that, greatly padding whatever relative technical content you had. I don't want every technical paper to turn into that, ethics should be treated as a higher-level overview of concerns in a field, with a study dedicated to the ethical concerns of that field (by domain-specific ethics specialists).
Is your concern weapon automaton, or animal rights?
I'm not going to start campaigning against it or changing my life. But it still makes me deeply uncomfortable, and that's allowed.
In what sense, and as opposed to what? What aren't you allowed to feel irrationally uncomfortable, or baselessly concerned with?
We don't need to be experimenting on people, regardless of how many brain cells they may have.
There was a case a few years back about a parasitic twin attached to an Egyptian baby that had to be removed. It had a brain and semblance of a face, but nothing else. But when removing it, they gave it a name, because it was a person.
Check out the venerable fruit fly (drosophila melanogaster) and its known lifecycle and behavioral traits. They're a high profile neuroscience research target for them I believe; their connectome being fully mapped made the news pretty hard a few years ago.
Fruit flies have ~140,000 neurons.
The catch is that these brain-on-a-substrate organoids are nothing like actual structured, developed brains. They're more like randomly wired-together transistors than a proper circuit, to use an analogy.
So even though by the numbers they'd definitely have the potential to be your nightmare fuel, I'd be surprised if they're anywhere close in actuality.
From the video, my impression was "we have yet to figure out an effective way to reward/punish, this is just a PoC of the interface"
(The rat brain guys repeated the experiment until the plane stopped crashing, but no "learning" was happening; it was expected that when the neuron's range reached so-and-so, that the plane would fly level. So they started with a neuron outside that range, showed that it crashed, then adjusted the neuron until it flew level. But that's not what "rat brain flies plane" implies.)