[HN Gopher] Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong
___________________________________________________________________
Neurons in a dish learn to play Pong
Author : rogerian
Score : 221 points
Date : 2022-10-13 11:34 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| ruined wrote:
| hell is real
| GolfPopper wrote:
| SF author (and marine biologist) Peter Watts described something
| very much like this, only more advanced, in his book _Maelstrom_
| (2001):
|
| "Achilles Desjardins had always found smart gels a bit creepy.
| People thought of them as brains in boxes, but they weren't. They
| didn't have the parts. Forget about the neocortex or the
| cerebellum--these things had nothing. No hypothalamus, no pineal
| gland, no sheathing of mammal over reptile over fish. No
| instincts. No desires. Just a porridge of cultured neurons,
| really: four-digit IQs that didn't give a rat's ass whether they
| even lived or died. Somehow they learned through operant
| conditioning, although they lacked the capacity either to enjoy
| reward or suffer punishment. Their pathways formed and dissolved
| with all the colorless indifference of water shaping a river
| delta."
|
| Much of his work, including _Maelstrom_ , is freely available on
| his own website:https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
| narrator wrote:
| Another great novel about emergent intelligence was _Blood
| Music_ by Greg Bear. A microorganism develops swarm
| intelligence.
| jbaber wrote:
| I thought you were going to say _Starfish_ by Watts, which also
| features smart gels.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| _Malestrom_ is the second book in the trilogy (or quadrology
| - the 4th book was split in two in some printings).
|
| I didn't have a copy of _Starfish_ handy, and I wasn 't sure
| if gels had been mentioned there or not.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| They are using human neurons for this? The one substrate we can
| be sure of is capable of producing consciousness?
| djmips wrote:
| Interesting question!
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02986-y
| ALittleLight wrote:
| This seems like a research area so horrific it could exist
| only in a comic book. This type of thing should not be funded
| or researched. I'm surprised it needs to be said but we
| shouldn't grow human brains to experiment on them. Maybe if
| we could understand and quantify consciousness and be sure we
| weren't subjecting something to hell - but certainly not
| while we can't do that.
| wruza wrote:
| What makes you think that experiments on living rodents
| aren't hell already? What is the crucial ethical difference
| between these species, apart from two facts, first that a
| full human has a legal status, second that most people will
| relate to an empty human brain more than to a non-empty
| non-human one (regardless of packaging).
|
| I understand legal/relatable parts, but is there more to
| it?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| One scientist studies tumors by causing tumors in rats.
| Another scientist studies tumors by causing them in
| humans. If you said to the second scientist "Hey, that's
| wrong, stop!" And he said "What's the crucial difference
| between rats and humans?" Would you be convinced by that
| line of argument?
| cercatrova wrote:
| Well, is that not basically the vegan argument against
| suffering, in any form, for any type of animal or
| sentient being? The vegan would probably posit that they
| are equal.
| fjeifisjf wrote:
| Obviously yes, rats don't deserve tumors.
| wruza wrote:
| This hypothetical situation implies something I wouldn't
| fail to ask first. Are these humans persons or are they
| "empty"? I don't see a difference between a
| {person,experience}-less human and a rat (in this
| setting, legal and parental implications aside), but
| maybe you do. Both are able to experience pain and
| negative emotions. One of them being of a [non-]familiar
| kind changes nothing to me.
|
| Iow, put yourself into the shoes of that rat or that
| empty brain and tell:
|
| - which one would you choose to be (if given no other
| option),
|
| - why,
|
| - and what you expect to sense differently.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| YC '23 - Stem Cell Recycling - Stem.ly
|
| It almost writes itself.
| bigyikes wrote:
| Flame bait comment. It's not a valid comparison.
|
| Terminating a natural embryo is not the same as growing
| an artificial brain which, for all we know, might
| experience the worst kind of hell imaginable.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| johnnylambada wrote:
| Just as possible that allowing this consciousness to do
| exactly what it was designed to do and achieve such a
| sublime state of flow that it would be a crime to NOT let
| it experience Pong.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| _" Hundreds of thousands of human neurons growing in a dish"_
|
| It seems doubtful that hundreds of thousands of human neurons
| would lead to consciousness.
|
| _" Although the company calls its system DishBrain, the
| neurons are a far cry from an actual brain, Kagan says, and
| show no signs of consciousness."_
|
| ...then again, would they be able to tell? There's not a lot of
| I/O in this situation.
| austinjp wrote:
| Indeed. Although the lab couldn't check for signs of
| consciousness. If they'd been able to do so, they'd have
| cracked the "hard problem" of consciousness, which would be
| far bigger news. So this is blather at best, and ethics-
| washing at worst.
| drdeca wrote:
| I think "being able to describe exhaustively the conditions
| under which something is conscious" is sometimes called the
| "pretty hard problem of consciousness", as opposed to the
| hard problem? (Also considered unsolved though)
| tsol wrote:
| You can monitor brain activity. Hard to be conscious if there
| is no activity in the cells.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I agree that low numbers of neurons are unlikely to lead to
| human-level consciousness. I have zero faith that researchers
| in this area won't continue to push the limits - perhaps even
| if they don't publish on doing so.
|
| I see this research as a red flag "hey, we are approaching
| something very bad" and while the flag itself may not be a
| problem we should heed the warning and change direction.
|
| All this said, my understanding is that this research is in
| part inspired by or associated with the phenomenon of people
| with encephalopathy who have greatly diminished brain volumes
| but are still conscious. This says to me we can't reliably
| predict how many neurons are necessary before creating
| consciousness.
| sva_ wrote:
| > The one substrate we can be sure of is capable of producing
| consciousness?
|
| How can you be sure that anyone other than you is conscious?
| Why shouldn't animals be conscious?
| tshaddox wrote:
| > How can you be sure that anyone other than you is
| conscious?
|
| That doesn't seem like a more or less difficult question than
| asking how I can be sure that human neurons are the substrate
| responsible for producing consciousness. If it turns out that
| the other humans I observe only _seem_ like they 're
| conscious, then it could also turn out that my neurons only
| _seem_ to be the substrate producing my consciousness. Of
| course, this is just terrible epistemology.
| sva_ wrote:
| Yeah, and I really don't see how that substrate should be
| much different from that in other animals such as, say,
| chimpanzees. It seems silly to criticize this research just
| based on the fact that the neurons were cultured from
| humans in my opinion.
| melagonster wrote:
| human just can't accept human suffer. most of legal of us
| is about protecting human.
| p1necone wrote:
| Yeah this makes me _really_ uncomfortable. We have no idea
| really what causes consciousness to arise, but "enough actual
| animal/human neurons to perform complex tasks" doesn't seem
| like an unlikely way to do it to me.
|
| "Unimaginable suffering in a petri dish" is not something I
| want even a tiny chance of creating.
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Given that they took skin cells, cultured them to pluripotent
| stem cells, then convinced the stem cells to grow neurons, I
| don't think they grew an interoceptive cortex, basal ganglia,
| or other brain areas necessary for emotional experience as we
| know it. "Exhibit sentience" is... well, let's call it a
| wordplay.
| wruza wrote:
| To evaluate these chances, one has to understand what
| "suffering" is. It may (or may not) be purely evolutional
| thing which cannot be easily reproduced in a dish. Perhaps
| the whole thing is a plague that only emerges in/for natural-
| life conditions. While the configuration space is likely(?)
| almost infinite, the natural selector is only one.
| austinjp wrote:
| Well.... no. It's only _necessary_ to know whether
| suffering exists (it does). After that it 's _sufficient_
| to consider whether there 's a greater than zero chance of
| creating it (there seems to be).
|
| That's enough to say "let's not do this until we have
| better data".
|
| If it turns out the second step is unknowable, that's
| enough to say "let's never do this".
|
| These are subjective decisions, and some may suggest that
| there are gains that outweigh the potential suffering. I am
| currently unconvinced.
| reuben364 wrote:
| But it's always unknowable. The only
| consciousness/suffering one truly knows is one's own. We
| just use heuristics like "this human/animal behaves like
| I do when suffering". Where we draw the line is
| completely arbitrary.
| austinjp wrote:
| My second step still stands :)
|
| The unique data-point here is that we are _creating_
| these "mini brains". I'm not invoking a knee-jerk
| "sCiEnTiSTs pLaY g0d OMG!" reaction, but I will invoke
| Goldblum's Objection: "your scientists were so
| preoccupied with whether or not they _could_ that they
| didn 't stop to think if they _should_ ".
|
| Like several others in this thread, I'm bemused that this
| passed bio-ethics. Drawing the line isn't entirely
| arbitrary, ethics panels do it every day. We already have
| the tools, but it seems that in this case we don't know
| whether to apply them, or which to apply.
| wruza wrote:
| I agree and am unconvinced too. But currently we also
| agree to create suffering at the industrial scale in
| mice. Pretty strange choice of principles.
| austinjp wrote:
| Indeed. Although some of us try to opt out of that stuff
| too, as much as possible.
|
| The ethical questions raised by anomalous situations like
| this indicate that our historical decisions may need
| revising.
| cercatrova wrote:
| > _After that it 's sufficient to consider whether
| there's a greater than zero chance of creating it (there
| seems to be)._
|
| That is a Kantian, deontological approach, an ethical
| framework not shared by all. The utilitarian would ask
| how much suffering would be caused as compared to how
| much good it would produce.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Pong playing? Infinite good!
| austinjp wrote:
| Erm no. I'm not advocating morality driven by "duty". I'm
| pointing out the pragmatic issue that we don't know where
| we're heading, so perhaps we should pause and have a good
| hard think about the possibilities :)
|
| Utilitarianism also comes with its own issues, of course.
| Exploitation of minorities and the disempowered, for
| example (including manufactured brains-in-vats, it
| seems).
| jll29 wrote:
| As a researcher in responsible AI, I wonder what they told
| their ethics committee, if anything.
| stagas wrote:
| Yes imagine a life where you play pong for orgasms.
| whaaswijk wrote:
| I hope you're joking because that actually sounds like a
| terribly impoverished life for a human consciousness.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| If there are extraterrestrials, "Neurons in a dish learn to play
| Pong" is probably the sort of thing they say while watching us
| from their UFOs.
| davisr wrote:
| Probably.
| http://tothemoon.ser.asu.edu/data_g/G04/Unidentified/full/GT...
| velcrovan wrote:
| I tend to think that if there are extraterrestrials, they
| probably look a lot more like neurons in a dish than like us.
| odrekf wrote:
| I tried to reply to someone but he got censored for pointing out
| that if you care about two neurons you should care about the
| animals that go through hell in the meat/dairy industry. Here's
| my reply:
|
| One can't hope to truly know if another individual (be it a human
| or any other animal) is conscious (the hard problem of
| consciousness). But if it has eyes like us, mouth like us, plays
| like us, cries/screams when hurt like us, and even seem to dream
| like us (asleep dogs sometimes move like they are running in
| their dreams, and when they wake up they look confused and still
| perturbed from what they were seeing in their minds), it makes
| perfect sense to assume that they are conscious like us, and it's
| the ethical thing to do.
| hirundo wrote:
| If you apply the same standard within our own species you would
| be accused of xenophobia. Why should it be different across
| species?
| melagonster wrote:
| if all species are same, what's different between vegetables
| and animals? or even COVID-19 virus and bacteria?
| fjeifisjf wrote:
| lvass wrote:
| Do we have an open source PetriNeuronSDK to communicate with
| these yet? I can't wait until we get cloud neurons IaaS.
| ummonk wrote:
| It seems needlessly provocative to use human neurons to do this.
| Presumably they could have had the same effects with neurons from
| another species. It's like they want to provoke a backlash from
| religious people against scientific experimentation.
| tsol wrote:
| Are there actually any religious people against this? In
| general I haven't heard of groups that are against culturing
| human cells
| drdeca wrote:
| Well, seydor's comment that they actually used _induced
| pluripotent_ cells derived from skin cells, rather than stem
| cells from fetuses, makes me feel better about it.
|
| I'm of course not against, in general, "culturing human
| cells", but I have moral uncertainty/concern about those
| derived from fetuses, as well as any large quantities (in one
| group) of human neuron cells (or, also, but to a lesser
| degree, large quantities in one group of other kinds of nerve
| cells).
|
| That's not to say that I would be confident that what was
| done would be wrong if they were using cells derived from
| fetuses, but, I would think it _more likely_ that there would
| be a moral problem with it. (And this feeling /belief/concern
| is in part due to religious belief.)
|
| (I can imagine someone saying "But seeing as induced
| pluripotent stem cells seem to behave in effectively the same
| ways as 'actual stem cells', how do you know that whatever
| moral problems you think would be present if using 'actual
| stem cells', don't also apply to the induced pluripotent
| cells?" And to that imaginary interlocutor, I must admit that
| thay have somewhat of a point, in that I suppose I can't
| entirely rule that out, but, my intuition, which
| unfortunately is most of what I have to go on because we have
| not been granted a book detailing precisely every last detail
| of the metaphysics of personhood etc. , suggests to me that
| it seems substantially less likely to be a problem.
|
| Even if it might theoretically be possible to use induced
| pluripotent cells to form a fetus which could develop into a
| full child which would be a person,
|
| (is this thought to be theoretically possible? I mean,
| outside of something as general purpose as arbitrarily
| rearranging the atoms, or using cells from an outside source,
| and just moving induced pluripotent cells around while
| treating them with various chemicals and nutrients, is it
| thought that in theory this could produce a viable fetus?)
|
| it still feels reasonably unlikely that without actually
| starting to do that, and only converting what type of cells
| some skin cells are, that this would constitute creating
| something with any moral patienthood. One such reason being
| that, I would think, there wouldn't be a clear distinction of
| _how many_ such entities would have been created. Would it be
| one moral patient per cell? That seems implausible,
| especially assuming that multiple such cells would need to be
| used together to create a viable fetus. One might point out
| then that identical twins can arise from one zygote by the
| group of cells that the zygote becomes splitting into two
| parts, and so if moral patienthood is incompatible with
| ambiguity-of-number, then this should also apply to
| blastocyst or whatever. And, perhaps? Though, in that case,
| there is still the clear differentiation of "these came from
| this zygote", so perhaps there could be some reason there.
|
| Again, my position is one of uncertainty about these
| questions, and associated concern. My position is not that I
| _know for certain_ that it is less morally problematic to use
| induced pluripotent stem cells than it is to use stem cells
| derived e.g. directly from a blastocyst, but that it seems
| substantially less likely to me that using induced
| pluripotent cells is a problem than it is that using stem
| cells from a blastocyst is a problem, though neither is
| certain.)
| drawingthesun wrote:
| It's not needlessly provocative human neurons have shown in
| almost every study to be superior to all other animal neurons.
|
| Let the backlash happen and as a society let's put a stop to
| letting religious idiocy get in the way of science.
|
| There is an entire field of study for ethical science and I
| stand behind that 100%.
|
| Unethical science can get lost!
|
| I'm not a progress at any costs type of person.
|
| But is this actually unethical or just something a religious
| idiot doesn't like?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > human neurons have shown in almost every study to be
| superior
|
| Until recently I thought a neuron is a neuron is a neuron.
| How are they different between species?
| drdeca wrote:
| My understanding is that they don't just differ between
| species, but they differ substantially between different
| types within the same individual.
|
| My understanding is extremely limited.
|
| That being said, my impression is that some of the axiis
| they can vary on include things like : how they respond to
| some other chemicals ("neurotransmitters"? not sure if
| that's the right word) in their environment, whethether
| they produce/emit those other chemicals, the types of
| conditions under which they fire (e.g. from how much they
| "leak" activation over time, counteracting the signals they
| get sent from others), things like uh, I think(?) whether
| they tend to fire at a particular rate by default which can
| be increased or decreased by signals they receive(?) vs
| whether they by default do not fire unless they receive
| enough other signals,
|
| I'm unsure of basically all the things I just listed, but
| my impression is that there are lots of ways they can
| differ, and they definitely aren't all the same.
| obscur wrote:
| I would like a source for the first claim. When I read the
| preprint for this paper half a year ago it was actually one
| of their claims that to the best of their knowledge their
| Pong experiment was the first to show human neurons being
| 'better'.
| lvass wrote:
| Only religious idiots would prefer a "normal" life over
| having human-brained gorilla chimeras do all the work and
| just consuming psychotropics all day, right?
| rongopo wrote:
| Very few people are not brainwashed in one direction or
| another, there is no need to call them idiots.
| antiterra wrote:
| FYI, pretty sure the parent of the comment you're
| responding to is the one that's actually calling them
| idiots.
| rongopo wrote:
| Enough of talking about them, then :)
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Oh captain my captain, lead me to this promised land!
| seydor wrote:
| technically they used human skin cells, which they induced to
| be pluripotent, which then became neurons
| _mhr_ wrote:
| They compared human cells to mouse cells, showing improved
| performance for the human cells.
| austinjp wrote:
| From the website of the lab doing this https://corticallabs.com
|
| Human neural networks raised in a simulation
|
| The neurons exist inside our Biological Intelligence Operating
| System (biOS). biOS runs the simulation and sends information
| about their environment, with positive or negative feedback. It
| interfaces with the neurons directly. As they react, their
| impulses affect their digital world.
|
| Our first minds
|
| The dishbrain is currently being developed at the CL0 laboratory
| in Melbourne, AU. We bring these neurons to life, and integrate
| them into The biOS with a mixture of hard silicon and soft
| tissue. Our first cohort have learnt to play Pong. They grow,
| adapt and learn as we do.
|
| Silicon meets neuron
|
| Neurons are cultivated inside a nutrient rich solution, supplying
| them everything they need to be happy and healthy. Their physical
| growth is across a silicon chip, which has a set of pins that
| send electrical impulses into the neural structure, and receive
| impulses back in return.
|
| The Ultimate Learning Machine
|
| Those actions have a positive or negative effect in biOS, which
| the mind perceives, adapting to improve that feedback. The human
| neuron is self programming, infinitely flexible, the result of
| four billion years of evolution. What digital models try and
| emulate, we begin with.
|
| Why?
|
| There are many advantages to organic-digital intelligence. Lower
| power costs, more intuition, insight and creativity in our
| intelligences. But most importantly we are driven by three core
| questions.
|
| What will we discover if our intelligences train themselves?
|
| We know an organic mind is a better learner than any digital
| model. It can switch tasks easily, and bring learnings from one
| task to another. But more important is what we don't know. What
| are the limits of a mind connected to infinity? What can it do
| with data it literally lives in?
|
| What happens if we take a shortcut to generalised intelligence?
|
| Machine Learning algorithms are a poor copy of the way an organic
| neural network functions. So we're starting with the neuron,
| replacing decades of algorithms with millions of years of
| evolution. What happens as these native intelligences start
| solving the problems we'd previously left to software?
|
| How can we surpass the limits of silicon?
|
| Silicon is raw, rigid, unchanging. Our organic neural networks
| sit on top of this raw power, but the way they grow and evolve
| isn't limited to the software they run on. There is no software,
| it's coded in their DNA. How will computing change as we shift
| from hard silicon to soft tissue?
|
| RFN: Request For Neurons
|
| The dishbrain is learning and growing in biOS today, and soon
| we're opening an early access preview for selected developers.
| The biOS is our simulation environment, where you can program
| tasks, challenges and objectives for our minds. Join our
| developer program to get early access to our SDK, and secure
| training time with our minds.
| norwalkbear wrote:
| They also grew eye like structures too right.
| jawadch93 wrote:
| im3w1l wrote:
| So we can create microbrains of human neurons. Cool. But what
| about a gigabrain? Something smarter than all of us?
|
| For the record I do think such a creation should have personhood.
| And have the right to learn about and interact with the real
| world.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I wonder if in the future we'll have some sort of FPGA formed by
| a neural dish. Hook up an HDMI port to a cube of neurons and it
| OCRs text or tracks objects. I suspect biological variations in
| cells would make the results inconsistent, and far inferior to
| what we can do with semiconductors presently, but it's cool to
| think about.
| d--b wrote:
| > he work is a proof of principle that neurons in a dish can
| learn and exhibit basic signs of intelligence
|
| Absolutely not. This shows that you can teach neurons to exhibit
| a reflex behavior adapted to the given stimuli - which shouldn't
| come as a surprise. At best this is jellyfish-like level of
| intelligence.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Have you seen magic tricks revealed? It's such a let down.
| After that you can't unsee how it's done and it becomes a
| regular guy concealing some information. Before that there was
| a mystery how the heck it was done. It's the same thing going
| on here, both with AI and the understanding of the wetware
| mind.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Except with AI and wetware there's still a mystery remaining.
| Not all cases have a rigorous description of what's going on
| in the middle level of abstraction.
|
| Low level: proteins/matrices.
|
| Middle level: ???
|
| High level: it thinks!
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Transformers have shown that language development can also be
| explained by what you derisively call reflex behavior, with no
| need for specialized Chomskyan recursion circuitry, as the same
| mechanism with slight modification (decision transformers) also
| plays Pong.
| rryan wrote:
| There's a huge difference between fitting a probabilistic
| model to a data distribution then sampling from it (what
| GPT-3 is) and agents that invent language and use it to
| communicate.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Not much. A transformer trained on multiple senses can
| learn the sound that an animal makes and associate it with
| seeing that animal. It can also learn how another agent
| reacts after it says a word.
|
| The huge difference is actually between animal reflexes and
| learned behavior. Reflex is built-in. I didn't learn to
| kick my leg in response to a tap on the patellar tendon.
| rryan wrote:
| I agree that a Transformer is an example of a "reflexive"
| behavior because it learns to react in a context (via
| gradient descent rather than evolution as the learning
| algorithm). It's a conditional categorical distribution
| on steroids.
|
| I also agree it's not much different than what's going on
| in this petri dish with pong.
|
| But I don't think that's a profound statement.
|
| What I'm saying is that calling what a Transformer does
| "language development" isn't accurate. A Transformer
| can't "develop" language in that sense, it can only learn
| "reflexive" behavior from the data distribution it's
| trained on (it could never have produced that data
| distribution itself without the data existing in the
| first place).
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > I agree that a Transformer is an example of a
| "reflexive"
|
| I said that it is _not_ reflexive. It is learned. Just
| because after you learn something, it becomes easy does
| not mean that it is a reflex. I explained why language
| development can be done with little more than a
| transformer learning from how others behave when you make
| an utterance and from how you behave when you hear
| something, like a decision transformer learning what
| happens after it takes certain actions in Pong.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Agreed....but! This opens some interesting thoughts about
| various things.
|
| Sure this Petri dish is not intelligent and conscious. But it's
| just a load of neurons right, just like the Petri dish in our
| head. Are _we_ intelligent and conscious in that case? Or are
| we just a scaled up Petri dish that reacts to more varied
| stimuli?
| austinjp wrote:
| This leads to a circular problem: if we resist the notion
| that we're just scaled-up Petri dish brains (perhaps because
| we "feel conscious") how can we be sure the Petri dish mini-
| brains are so different from us? In which case, are they
| conscious after all, to some degree?
| nazgul17 wrote:
| Every new AI gets demoted pretty quickly. Playing pong would
| have been once called AI.
| bowsamic wrote:
| That's because once we understand it and achieve it it's no
| longer considered intelligence. The same will happen when we
| have actual human robots that are indistinguishable from real
| humans. People will say "obviously not intelligence or
| anything related to it, just doing x, y, and z"
| tiborsaas wrote:
| And then one looks into the mirror :)
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Clearly, the sheep they dream of are electric.
| superkuh wrote:
| This is about 40x more cells than they used to fly a fighter jet
| in a simulation back in 2004.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1572 .
|
| I suppose the claim to fame in this similar study is the use of
| the title organoid and there's some legitimacy to that. Form and
| function are intimately tied in the brain and just a bunch of
| neurons on a petri dish isn't quite an organ.
| Kalanos wrote:
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >(Discovery Channel, USA, 22 October 2004)
|
| That's a bit like saying battle bots solved locomotion of
| robots.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Gosh, that study. It was the first time my faith in academia
| was severely shaken. As a 19yo, I spent around 6 hours reverse
| engineering what was going on, and then fell into a spiral of
| "Is this what academia is all about? Really?" Because I was so
| fascinated by the concept, then it was such a letdown...
|
| It took some time to appreciate that there are some worthwhile
| ideas in that paper. But it was my first experience with
| "Academic lies about accomplishment to secure further funding."
|
| It's hard to say whether "lie" or "severely exaggerate" is
| appropriate.
|
| A method existed to measure a signal from a neuron. A second
| method existed to modify that signal. Whenever the plane
| crashed, the signal was modified slightly, until the plane flew
| level.
|
| It didn't learn to fly. The researcher modified a neuron
| (steady signal) until it gave the appropriate signal (e.g.
| zero) to fly level.
|
| Negative signal, plane banks left. Positive signal, plane banks
| right. If plane crashes, modify neuron until signal is neither
| positive nor negative. That was the extent of the study.
|
| In that context, do you feel like the neurons learned to fly?
| Maybe. It's certainly similar in spirit to reinforcement
| learning in modern times. But I wouldn't say that setting a
| signal to zero is a nice definition of "flew a plane".
|
| In other words, there was no active feedback; if you pointed
| the plane in a slightly different direction, it would
| immediately crash. It wasn't doing anything more than setting
| the signal slowly over time to an answer that was known ahead
| of time. (Keep the plane level by not moving the controls.)
|
| Suppose the neurons learned to draw a straight line. That was
| essentially what was being demonstrated here. If you substitute
| "plane crash" with "line becomes a curve", it becomes much less
| exciting, to say the least.
|
| "Isn't that just learning to set a signal to a constant value?"
| "Yep" "Will it always become the same constant?" "Yep" "Can't
| we already do that?" "Yep"
|
| I was so disillusioned that it took many years to stop
| believing that academia itself was at fault for misinforming
| the public so badly. After all, it's almost two decades later,
| and people still believe "rat brain flies plane" happened in
| 2004.
|
| If I could go back in time, I'd tell myself not to worry about
| it; focus on the academics that are working quietly on the
| frontier, not the ones trying to raise funding for their lab.
|
| At least the neurons in today's study actually learned to play
| something. But if the past is any indication, I'd err on the
| side of skepticism.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Do you know the actual study which did this?
|
| Because the Nature citation on where the work was done is
| literally "The Discovery Channel".
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It was big news at the time. Headlines everywhere. Rat
| brain flies plane. You'd think that within a few years,
| maybe rat brains would be the primary way we'd control
| planes.
|
| I did manage to track down the original study, which at the
| time wasn't too easy; this was before scihub. I wish I'd
| saved it for posterity. My motivation went from "this is
| exactly what I want to do with my life" to laying on the
| couch wondering what the heck could possibly be happening,
| when the whole world believes rat brains are flying planes,
| vs what was actually demonstrated in the paper.
|
| If you do find it, please post it. It'd be a nice stroll
| through memory lane, and an interesting retrospective on
| how to get funding for one's own research lab. (A handy
| skill to have, if you don't mind... well, exaggerating, to
| say the least.)
| leonmoonen wrote:
| Thomas DeMarse is mentioned in some of the 2004 news
| articles. His Google Scholar profile has the following
| short paper published at a conference in 2005: https://sc
| holar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Thom...
| justin_ wrote:
| I think it might be this one:
|
| _Adaptive flight control with living neuronal networks
| on microelectrode arrays_
|
| The brain is perhaps one of the most robust and fault
| tolerant computational devices in existence and yet
| little is known about its mechanisms. Microelectrode
| arrays have recently been developed in which the
| computational properties of networks of living neurons
| can be studied in detail. In this paper we report work
| investigating the ability of living neurons to act as a
| set of neuronal weights which were used to control the
| flight of a simulated aircraft. These weights were
| manipulated via high frequency stimulation inputs to
| produce a system in which a living neuronal network would
| "learn" to control an aircraft for straight and level
| flight.
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1556108
|
| https://sci-
| hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2005.155610...
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thank you so much! That's the exact one. I'll upload it
| to imgur, since scihub urls tend to die over time:
| https://imgur.com/a/vdQP17I
|
| The details are presented at the end of page 2. You can
| see on page 3 that the whole thing is a glorified "I can
| make neurons go to zero!" machine.
|
| It kills me because there _is_ real value in this work --
| the ability to modify neurons is a useful thing to be
| able to do. Showing that you can set them to specific
| values is worthwhile.
|
| But that wasn't what it was presented as. The focus was
| on the idea that the neurons somehow learned something.
| Maybe they did, and maybe time will prove me a fool by
| showing that this is how neurons learn in general. But it
| was so disheartening to spend hours carefully going over
| every detail, full of excitement at the possibility of
| _machines_ that can _learn_ ... only to realize I could
| do the same thing by setting a value to zero in python,
| and that the complicated language seemed designed to
| conceal this.
|
| I remember seeing a video on the discovery channel where
| they were interviewing him. He gave a dazzling account of
| the implications of this work.
|
| Maybe he was predicting the upcoming ML boom. But now
| that I've worked in ML for a few years, I can safely say
| that this work didn't help us get here. Maybe it helped
| biologists figure out how to control the signals that
| neurons deliver.
|
| (I still think that it's pretty darn cool that you can
| manipulate neurons at all, so hats off to whoever figured
| out how to do that. I just wish it was presented as what
| it was: the ability to set a value to zero over time via
| neurons.)
|
| I really want to make a joke like "You know what else
| would set neurons to zero? Set them on fire and wait,"
| but the paper showed they could be set to arbitrary
| values. Which of course was the interesting and valuable
| part in the first place, not the plane stuff. But planes
| make good headlines.
| seydor wrote:
| i would urge people to read the paper instead. The 'learning' is
| a bit iffy , and this was meant to test the brain theory of
| Friston rather than plug neurons into pong. Still, great job on
| the neurotechnology involved and a step in the direction where we
| should be going, controlling large numbers of neurons
|
| Ars Technica has a better article, although they dont describe
| the dense electode array correctly:
| https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/a-dish-of-neurons-ma...
| nier wrote:
| For those who like me are wondering where those neurons come
| from. An answer can be found in the Ars Technica article:
|
| "[...] the researchers tested two types of neurons: some
| dissected from mouse embryos, and others produced by inducing
| human stem cells to form neurons. "
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Finally a sliver of future I'm psyched about. Induce stem
| cells to form neurons? Next step induce new neurons to form
| new connections in existing brain!?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Yes but given that mouse neurons were used as a base, you
| now have a strong craving for cheese.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| :)
|
| It would be so cool if we can get a grasp on memory,
| epigenetics and all the other science I don't understand.
|
| Because that doesn't seem so far fetched! if mice do in
| fact have a biological 'need for cheese' - the sequel
| pier25 wrote:
| Mice prefer grain based stuff like tortilla, bread, or
| peanut butter.
| squarefoot wrote:
| ...and cables.
| olalonde wrote:
| Fun fact: mice do not particularly like cheese[0].
|
| [0] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/manchester
| /531921...
| fragmede wrote:
| That would be cool, though current research on adult
| neurogenesis says we keep getting new neurons throughout
| life anyway
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| Basically all the men on my dad's side die of
| alzheimer's, so any neuroprotective, regenerative, or
| some more accurate verb to stop or reverse function loss
| is super fascinating to me. Others as well.
|
| Plus who wouldn't want to get just a bit smarter or help
| get that youthful memory back; can't be the only one who
| is foggier ;)
| austinjp wrote:
| Genuine question: why "should" we be going in this direction?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Because we can, and if we don't someone less ethical will.
| trgn wrote:
| "if we don't someone less ethical will."
|
| But they still will, why wouldn't they if supposed ethical
| researchers do as well. I've heard this sort of argument
| before, and I understand the reasoning behind it.
| seydor wrote:
| because it's bottom-up, as opposed to mouse studies that
| impose our own ideas and record from a tiny fraction of brain
| cells
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| We do what we must, because we can.
| EricMausler wrote:
| To fight neurodegenerative diseases
| austinjp wrote:
| Except the lab doing this make no mention of treating
| disease. They want to "shortcut machine learning" by using
| living tissue to perform tasks: https://corticallabs.com/
| serf wrote:
| post-apocalyptic horrible scenarios aside, there are plenty
| of therapeutic reasons why it would be nice to have neuron-
| level control of brain tissue.
| rongopo wrote:
| Is curiosity a good answer for you? For me it is.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Here's an article that's almost 20 years old on a similar topic
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20041023144731/https://www.wired...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20041106064802/http://www.napa.u...
|
| EDIT: it seems the researcher working on this project passed away
| recently :(
| yazzku wrote:
| Funny how everybody here panics about 'the hell' of experimenting
| with human brains that could possibly grow consciousness. What
| about the actual hell we put animals through so that we can eat
| them? There are also studies suggesting that, for example, crows
| and other animals have some form of consciousness:
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/crows-consciousne...
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/do-crows-possess-f...
|
| You don't need to imagine hell, it's already here.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| A question for someone who understands the neurology and biology
| of this much more than I do:
|
| Once I have a group of neurons like this trained to do something,
| can I actually count on them to continue performing that task
| until they die? Or is it possible they spontaneously reorganize
| or "learn" a previously unseen behavioral pattern?
| austinjp wrote:
| They're biological. A lot can happen :) Remember this includes
| weirdness like viruses, tumors, aging... as well as
| specifically neural stuff like habituation (diminished
| sensitivity to repeated stimulation), sensitisation (increased
| sensitivity to repeated stimulation), spontaneous misfiring,
| reorganisation (basically creating/destroying or
| upweighting/downweighting synapses) etc etc etc.
|
| Of course, then you'll need to debug problems by dripping
| antidepressants (or psychedelics, or stimulants, or
| depressants, or various hormones, or....) into the Petri dish.
|
| Biology is wonderfully crazy.
| noduerme wrote:
| Skip the SSRIs and let them loose on Red Dead 2. In a couple
| weeks they'll be talking to a horse in ways we never
| imagined.
| donny2018 wrote:
| TIL I'm somewhat of a Petri dish myself.
| simonh wrote:
| "Did you send your computer in for repair?"
|
| "No, therapy."
| x86x87 wrote:
| So the short answer is no
| lvass wrote:
| A related question: can I indefinitely test they're performing
| their task correctly? When operating these neurons for actual
| tasks, real time challenge-response-like testing is probably a
| good idea. But if they can learn, eventually they may be able
| to trick the tests. How would one design automated tests to
| evaluate the state of learning-capable systems?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| >How would one design automated tests to evaluate the state
| of learning-capable systems?
|
| A question many call center managers ask themselves.
| noduerme wrote:
| The nightmare of AI is it's a black box. The nightmare of
| people is that they're people. (or, per Sartre, "hell is
| other people" ... but that's such a freighted human
| perspective).
|
| Gee if only we could grow meat to eat in a lab and grow
| brains on substrate to answer phone calls and generate
| images, we could do away with the complexity of other humans
| we might have to interact with. Except... you have even less
| understanding of what motivates that clump of cells than you
| do what motivates your office secretary.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's a super cool idea. I'm just not sure
| exactly when bioethics went completely out the window.
| amelius wrote:
| What's more, you can apply evolution to your Petri dish.
| toxicFork wrote:
| Welcome to the field of QA automation
| jerojero wrote:
| Hm. That's a very good question. I haven't kept up with
| neurobiology research but I imagine as long as the same neurons
| keep their connections to the same other neurons then it would
| be possible for them to keep performing the task. And neurons
| will do keep these connections if the stimuli was strong enough
| and showed up repeatedly.
|
| But when the task is not required for a very long time the
| circuit that turns this task on will weaken, at least in the
| brain. And neurons will be forming other connections, but that
| doesn't mean they will necessarily "forget" about older ones.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Here is a journal article that might be relevant for you:
|
| https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(14)01362-2
|
| Abstract: _"Neuronal plasticity in the brain is greatly
| enhanced during critical periods early in life and was long
| thought to be rather limited thereafter. Studies in primary
| sensory areas of the neocortex have revealed a substantial
| degree of plasticity in the mature brain, too. Often,
| plasticity in the adult neocortex lies dormant but can be
| reactivated by modifications of sensory input or sensory-
| motor interactions, which alter the level and pattern of
| activity in cortical circuits. Such interventions,
| potentially in combination with drugs targeting molecular
| brakes on plasticity present in the adult brain, might help
| recovery of function in the injured or diseased brain."_
| sally_glance wrote:
| Disclaimer: Also not a neurologist.
|
| I believe they certainly will reorganize in case of a (local
| nutrient) scarcity or damage event. That might result in
| "unseen" patterns as well, and by "unseen" I mean kinda random.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Glial cells are fascinating components of the brain.
|
| Artificial NeuroGlial Networks could be really interesting.
| amelius wrote:
| I guess they can become tired also, just like humans. (Not a
| biologist)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Makes me wonder how many states there are in a neuron.
|
| Like, they are similar to transistors but have more states than
| off (0) and on (1).
| janci wrote:
| Next step: run Doom
| [deleted]
| yrgulation wrote:
| Proper ai.
| sabertoothed wrote:
| N.I.
| ofou wrote:
| It's interesting to see research like this coming up. It might
| inform AI in unpredicted ways IMO.
|
| "In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a
| simulated game-world".
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662732...
| theflyingelvis wrote:
| Maybe they could run for senate in my home state
| crakenzak wrote:
| Depends on how quickly the neurons can learn to be incompetent
| and waste tax payer money, only then will they have a real
| chance ;)
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Hmm. Assuming we could feed in the sort of indicators and
| summary statistics that already form the way nation-states see
| reality, we could attach a literal brain to the organs of the
| state!
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Avenue 5 (under rated show) has President 2.0! An AI who is far
| more competent. Or more like able to make tough decisions
| without human backlash.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Wonder then they can plug in a camera and output the visual from
| the brain from recall. And would that be called consciousness?
| _spduchamp wrote:
| DishBrain is better for marketing than DishNightmares.
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