We stopped by these Islands (Cousin and Curieuse) during our honeymoon and am glad to see that the endangered giant turtles that live there will be increasing their number.
These guys trying their damndest to make wtf science story of the year.
I heard a podcast about this, basically people are growing human tissue in a lab, they call them organoids. And itās not just neurons, they are growing kidney organoids, skin organoids, you name it. Cancer researchers have been able to clone neurons with cancer, which they hope will allow them to test out drugs at a much more rapid pace than was possible before.
It feels like this is heading towards potentially a bioethics nightmare, but what do I know?
Really? Because I feel like weāre headed to a golden age of everything cured. Diabetes? Have a new pancreas. Etc. Ethics be damned, if I have a pancreas thatās pumping mud, Iād like a new one please.
Iām thinking about the computer brain there. Right now they are at ~200k neurons, so while itās human tissue, itās not really a brain. There is no consciousness. But as these things grow they begin developing into a brain, you might start getting lobes, a prefrontal cortex, etc. A human brain is more like 90B neurons, we are a ways apart here. But would it be ok to build a computer with a billion neurons? Ten billion?
Maybe somewhat analogous to how people dealt with studying embryos in a lab. At what point is it unethical to keep one alive? And we landed, as I understand it, on the āprimitive streakā as the sort of cutoff point.
Related: Current audiobook is Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Weāre on the road to living out The Handmaidās Tail, so why not more dystopia?
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Dystopia, dattopia. Whatever it takes.
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IMO weāre a long way from worrying about that.
[quote]At what point is it unethical to keep one alive?[/quote]
IMO thatās going to be a matter of opinion with no good answer or line to cross. Itās like abortion,itās my opinion that women should be able to choose that, but I donāt discount the people that argue that the fetus at some point has some sort of say in the matter as well. Whereās the line? Thereās no correct answer.
Thatās pretty much it, it isnāt black and white and folks are going to fight it out.
One thing these neuron based computers might solve is efficiency. Brain cells are efficient, whatever the hell we have now powering AI seems to be a little bit hungry for energy.
I have read that neurons may have a fundamentally different learning mechanism than artificial neurons. So that may help some.
However, i would guess the brains efficient learning depends in some way on how all the neurons are integrated with each other, with the rest of the body, and with the environment. In that case, using biological instead of artificial neurons may not help the efficiency all that much.
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Not so sure about this. I will think a bit with the old fashioned neurons and try to come up with some metrics to confirm/deny efficiency advantages.
The interface could use up a lot of power, and whatever else it takes on the electronics side. But neurons are crazy, the human brain uses about 20w of power. So to the extent we can do as many computations as possible using neurons, wouldnāt the whole system be quite efficient? At least compared to the data centers we have now sucking down megawatts?