Slashdot Mirror
Flying By Brain
Garabito writes "Scientists at the University of Florida made a living 'brain' by extracting 25,000 neurons from a rat's brain and culturing them inside a glass dish. Then, the neurons began to extend lines to each other, creating a living neural network between them. The dish had a grid of 60 electrodes connected to a computer running a flight simulator. The scientists were able to train the 'brain' to control the plane in the simulator and to react to conditions of the plane. Are we getting closer to create an artificially made conscious being, or perhaps, a living computer?" AlphaJoe was one of several readers to add a link to Wired's article on the experiment.
We designed neural networks to follow how brains work.
:)
Now we're using a brain to run a neural network.
Chicken-egg problem, anyone?
the last thing i want is a rat flying my plane
The first thing I thought was: I want one. Wonder if it could learn to play GTA?
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : Igor, would you mind telling me whose brain I did put in?
Igor : And you won't be angry?
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : I will NOT be angry.
Igor : Abby someone.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : Abby someone. Abby who?
Igor : Abby Normal.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein : Abby Normal?
Igor : I'm almost sure that was the name.
Soon we will all be augmented by our extra brain bags! Organic computers in a purse that we either wear or have implanted in our abdomens. I can't wait for the beta test.
Does this freak the shit out of anyone else?
I for one welcome our new plane-flying rat-brain overlords...
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
so from the point of view of the brain, it's an aeroplane. and it flies around in it's self contained reality.
As a recent graduate of the University of Florida, I have one question to ask of these researchers: How many days do we have to wait until they have a prototype that can function as the football team's head coach? It can't be too hard to do better than Coach Zook.
How did the clump of neurons know what they were trying to accomplish? More precicely, why didn't they try to crash the plane? What sort of positive/negative feedback did they use? I understand that this works, and vaugely how it works, but i can't wrap my poor little brain around what sort of feedback they used!
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
(in drone-like monotone)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things.
As an airline pilot for American, its nice to see my job being outsourced by rats in the future.
they outsource my programming job to a petri dish...
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
Am I the only one disturbed by this stuff? I know it's only a rat, but...imagine a world where your brain (sliced and diced) is worth more outside your body than inside. For some reason this kind of reminds me of Larry Niven's classic "Patchwork Girl".
- The race is not [always] to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. -
Bring a whole new meaning of a computer virus ...
Exciting? Yes. Scary? Hell Yes. Potential for Good? Check. Potential for evil? Big Check.
I for one...... ahh, screw it.
That's right. All your base.
Do you have to think in Russian?
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
So, how is this thing reacting to good and bad?
Did they create a neural net that falls through a given search space to a local or global minimum, or what?
Is "good" a total lack of input, i.e. the plane is flying straight with no lateral or vertical drift, and is degree of input dependent on the amount of lateral motion, etc.?
As I type this, it makes sense that this might be so, but I wonder why the network created a negative feedback system, and not a positive feedback system.
~ Mike
Michael C. Hollinger
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of 256 disembodied rat brains? (My first "traditional" slashdot joke.)
I wonder if human neurons would be more effective? Or are all neurons created equal, and only the structure of a brain makes it more or less intelligent? Could we grow rat neurons into a human brain? Maybe we could customize brains for certain abilities, by growing them along certain structures. I don't have alot of personal knowledge here, so i'm just putting out some questions that this brought up for me.
This reminds me of The Ship that Sang. Except... less cuddly and much more ratlike.
/Could/ it go insane? I guess a brain computer could have a lot more processing power than current logic gate technology, but it'd be like comparing an apple to an orange.
I wonder what the possible incarnations of this technology would be like... would they replace airline pilots? What would happen if one went insane?
I wonder what the PETA and other ethics groups will say in response to this research.
----- Wtcher Dragon, UDIC
Fear not! The Niblonians will save all of us!
Learn something new.
Making them pilot a flying aircraft is one thing, but you'll never get them to helm a sinking ship.
Steve Potter, the former mentor of the UF researcher has a pretty thorough description of it. http://www.neuro.gatech.edu/groups/potter/animat.h tml
I know of similar work with sea slugs in an off-campus lab funded partly by UF (the Whitney Lab). I'm not _too_ familiar with it, so this may not be entirely accurate. Basically, they found that neurons in the brain of the seaslugs are always in the same positions as other animals of the same species. They then started training animals, much like pavlov's dogs, to close their siphon whenever they were electrically shocked on their tail (by touching the siphon whenever they were shocked so the animal would relate the 2 stimuli). They then could isolate the neurons in the brain and train then individually. Two neurons in a petri dish would gradually connect and then share information. At the moment the group is working on identifying which genes control what part of the brain, or something like that..
I'll bite. No, this doesn't necessarily mean that a rat could be trained to fly a plane. A rat has millions of neurons, but most of them are taken up full-time doing specific things (strangely enough, a lot of that is scent processing). But if you can define goals for the rat, you can probably train it to do a lot of things, including a subset of the plane-flying challenge.
You don't want to think of the neurons as "hardware" exactly, either. The process of building and training a neural network is about replacing the programming component of building a system, not about replacing the hardware. Writing a piece of software to fly a plane by itself is hard work--complicated task, not easily reduced to algorithmic instruction sets. Lots of tiny rule modifications needed to the basic set of "maintain altitude and heading". The trick with neural nets is that you set up the network, and then you train it by trial and error to do the task. It programs itself, essentially.
We can and do build neural net simulations in pure software, which is where most of the research has been done so far. But neural net simulations on computers are VERY computationally expensive and take up a shitload of memory, so there are limits as to how big you can make your simulation and still do anything with it. This is a big problem, because neural nets can potentially do incredibly interesting things (like, say sentience!) if they get big enough--but we don't have computers big enough to model neural nets as complicated as we'd like.
I know the article says that these guys are only using this project to investigate how neurons work in the real world, but the potential applications of this are big. Neural nets using actual neurons, not expensive simulations, could be cheap enough to build and train that they would find commercial uses.
Does the question even mean anything?
Years ago, patients with extreme cases of epilepsy were treated by severing the connection between the left and right halves of the brain. The theory was that this would prevent the "electrical storm" of the seizure from propagating from one side of the brain to the other. This would supposedly reduce the frequency and severity of the seizures.
As a result, these individuals had, in their skulls, two independent brains with no communication link between them (a simplification, but mostly accurate). These patients would report strange experiences, such as getting up out of a chair and walking to another room, without having any idea why they were doing it. Essentially, the two halves of their brains were functioning independently, and sometimes "fought" over what the body was going to do.
It's a very interesting question -- did the "person" go into the left half of the brain, or the right? If it went into the left side, for example, what happened to the right side? Is it now a soulless automaton? How can a single person exist in two conscious modes simultaneously? Yet these people live normal lives, for the most part.
Sadly, you are trolling. But you raise an interesting point.
Adds a whole new dimension to the commercial, doesn't it?
This is your brain...
EricThis is your brain on drugs...
This is your brain on drugs flying a plane without you...
Why Vioxx is Prozac for lawyers
"If you think about your brain, and learning and the memory process, I can ask you questions about when you were 5 years old and you can retrieve information. That's a tremendous capacity for memory.
I have to say, I don't remember much from when I was five years old. I remember where I lived and maybe can guesstimate where I spent a specific summer, but most of my knowledge comes from what my parents told me and from little "text" snippets that somehow got stuck in my head (for example, names of cities I visited, etc.)
I can recall some images from the past, but I am not sure whether those are "true" memories or something synthesised by brain to "fill in the blank". This leads me to believe that human memory is rather lossy and large part of what I remember is just a rough approximation of what happened based on a few datapoints that brain actually remembers. Sort of like with people who have a defect in their iris - they still see an image in what's supposed to be a blind spot. This image is synthesised by brain to fill in the gap. Needless to say, occasionaly it turns deadly (especially while driving).
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
It's not too difficult to find a source of brains - visit your local abbatoir.
Wouldn't want to use the sheep brains though.... Imagine a "mob" of aircraft playing follow the leader...
Seriously, you would want to use something with a life span of more than a few years - besides, how do you do backups? how do you transfer existing knowledge to the new, untrained brain? (I mean more efficiently than us humans manage to using our existing I/O ports).
This is your captain, Rat Brain 4023, integrated neural network and my first officer, Rat Brain 4024. We'll be flying at an altitude of 30,000 feet and are expecting a nice smooth ride-- HOLY SHIT CHEESE!!! LOOK OVER THERE IT'S CHEESE!!! Ooop, sorry about that, false alarm. We're expecting nice weather in HEY THERE"s A F*ING CAT IN THE CARGO HOLD!!! Eject! Eject! Eject!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I fly for Eagle. As soon as the rat brains merge with the AA pilot group, they'll start flowing back to Eagle... to the left seat, of course.
(non-airline people, don't even try to understand that)
What makes you think a large simulation of a brain won't be conscious?
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Deleted
...because I think (although I am talking out my ass here) neurons are exempt from the auto-immune response, so rejection of donor cells is a non-issue.
If you know, is this true?
A link to where the journal article can be found if you're sciefically inclined http://www.bme.ufl.edu/research/publications/detai lpublication.php?PUBS_id=10
Frankly a collection of neurons just isn't powerful enough to "learn" how to fly a plane.
I will mention that to the pilot next time I get on an airplane.
Still, we have crossed a line. I'm not sure exactly where that line was, but I do know that people will be angry that we've crossed it. For better, or for worse, it's been crossed, and there is no reason to go back, and undo the experiment, infact, you couldn't. It will be interesting to watch where this field of science will go.
If I could tell these scientists but one thing, that would be to use a great deal, a great deal of caution in what they do, and what could happen becuase of their results.
Sig
You better be vegetarian! I, for one, know of many larger and more common masses of neurons that definately can feel things that are having much worse existances than flying a virtual plane.
Well, neurons are living cells... ...and therefore they can reproduce. This is called neurogenesis...and as I understand it can be stimulated by appropriate amounts of neurotrophin and other chemicals.
However, with all animal brains, there comes a point in the creature's development where the death rate is greater than the birth rate. In humans it happens at about three years, if memory serves (heh). If we could manage to find the correct chemical balance to maintain an average cell count indefinately, then perhaps we could devise a dietary supplement that would have the same (or better) effect on humans...
Of course, giving a person a lot of neurons doesn't mean that person will make use of them...
Why do you assume this is an organism? Neurons hooked to electrodes don't fit my description of organism. From dictionary.com organism is defined as:"An individual form of life, such as a plant, animal, bacterium, protist, or fungus; a body made up of organs, organelles, or other parts that work together to carry on the various processes of life" Alls I read are about neurons hooked to electrodes, nothing about various parts hooked together to carry out processes of life. A collection of neurons is very well powerful enough to "learn" how to fly. How do you think human pilots fly? Answer: With their large collection of neurons. Just as you can program a computer to fly a plane, you can do so with neurons. Whether this experiment is in fact doing that is another story since we don't have a good/full enough understanding of how the neuron processes work.
Don't anthromorphize the neuron. Neurons self organize and process signals in completely unconscious structures with no sense of pleasure. The neurons of the spinal cord, retina, or enteric nervous system for instance. Self organization and signal processing is just what neurons do. We've known for some time that certain types of electrical stimulation (high frequency) can strengthen a connection where as other (low frequency) can weaken a connection. But how this turns into computation, we don't have a clue.
I am really excited about this. If we can standardize this process, this gives us a whole new in vitro method for studying how neurons learn. Then we can apply drugs, or knock out proteins, or even do fluorescent imaging on the live neurons as they think. This could be as big a leap forward in the understanding of the mind as PCR or western blotting have been to understanding the cell.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm glad I'm not the only one that is slightly creeped out. I mean, I read about a lot of stuff that could fairly be considered "scifi-esque" that have people recoiling...Cloning (reproductive AND theraputic- that includes cloning organs), stem cell research, genetically engineering organisms like foods that resist pesticide or viruses and bacteria that eliminate certain diseases and cancers, no problem.
This just seems much creepier for some reason I can't pinpoint. Maybe for the very reasons you cited- human brains being a valuble commodity on some black market.
It raises some ethical concerns as well...What would be this brain's level of consciousness? What if it DID became self-aware and what it was being used for? Man, I gotta stop thinking about this now...
"He does look a bit Oompa like, even if his Loompa is a bit off-kilter."
There are certainly some amazing opportunities here to learn about how brains work, and no doubt this could help us in building better interfaces for cybernetic implants.
I just feel very uncomfortable with this kind of experimentation. It is my understanding that given enough complexity, any system has the potential to become self-aware. This plate has 25,000 neurons in a roughly two-dimensonal matrix (from the Wired article), so it's probably not even as smart as a bug so far (I am just guessing about this, does anyone have figures to compare this to?), but given enough space and time, might it not become sentient?
This reminds me of a similar experiment involving a fish brain controlling a robot. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1043001.stm
Then again - maybe I am being squeamish for no reason. After all, if your entire existence was flying imaginary planes, maybe that wouldn't be so bad.
No its not. Whats commonly referred to as a lobotomy, is to remove or seperate the frontal lobes ( Higher functions ) and not seperate the two hemispheres of the brain.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
Brings new meaning to the phrase "Pig Headed"
:(
yeah, that was a bad joke
... and something is REALLY bugging me about it.
How do you motivate a slice of rat brain to fly a plane? Does it feal pain when it crashes? Get nutrients when it flys far? What?
All too soon we will see little USB plug ins with these things to help the rail-gun spawn-campers aim fast in UT2024; Ultimate.
[FuZZy1] Punched a hole in 3L1T3's cranium
[3L1T3>] NOOB!
[3L1T3]; Rat-bot camper!
[FuZZy1]; LOL!1 That why tehy call me Fuzzy1
Rat brains flew a plane for the National Guard to get out of the Vietnam War.
Ok, I RTFA and the brain seems to be able to control a simulated airplane, but does the brain know...
...what bad weather is
...why it should avoid bad weather
...what a horizon is
...even what an airplane is
in other words, does it really know why it's doing what it's doing.
Jonathan B.
I wonder what kind of maintinence goes into keeping a 'living brain' computer. Do you have to feed it? Keep it cool? Will it go crazy if you don't give it enough beer?
Or to say "Mission Accomplished!"
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
It raises some ethical concerns as well...What would be this brain's level of consciousness?
Negligible. You have more complicated systems controlling your blood pressure, posture, digestion, etc. Besides, by the time any actual technology develops from this research, we should be able to create neurons from immortal lines of stem cells.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Ban all organism altering human concoctions because they just interfere with nature's natural way. It would be a shame to harm a living cell by taking medically prescribed drugs to aleive one of pain. To those with parkinson's disease, we, as humans, will no longer do anything for you because your hardship is nature's way of telling you that you suck and weeding you out. Headache? Too bad, suffer, it is natural. You think your headache is actually a symptom of a brain tumor, sucks to be you because we no longer do Cat Scans because the information we derive from them changes the natural path of nature. Being able to watch a nueral network grow and develop would be an extrodinary thing, that would change how we understand life, and how we understand computing, forever. It would shed light on mysteries that have bother us for years, but unfortunately, we can't go down that road, becuase in one persons view, studying it would simply be a "toy," and we can't have that.
Rats are ugly and disgusting and already have claws and teeth and biological weapons capability...now we give them Sidewinders, air-to-ground missles and 20 MM cannon. That's disturbing.
I'm immediately going to deploy a network of cat-neuron controlled anti-aircraft missle batteries.
damned rats.
They tried brain cells from different individuals. Here is the result:
Osama's cells: Plane kept crashing into buildings.
PHB cells: Plane kept flying in circles until it ran out of gas.
Bill Gates cells: Plane kept locking up.
SCO lawyer cells: Plane kept crashing, but blaming other planes.
RMS cells: Plane wanted to call itself "GNU Plane".
G.W. Bush cells: Plane kept crashing into Saddam Hussein no matter what, even if Osama was placed right next to Saddam.
John Kerry cells: Plane would fly to the left, and then to the right, and then to the left....
Slashdot reader cells: Plane would try to fly without first reading the flying manual.
Steve Jobs cells: Plane transformed itself into a slick, modern, translucent jet, but priced itself too high.
Mike Melvill cells: Plane kept going up and up until we lost track of it.
Emacs coder cells: Plane became a boat, a car, a house, a lawn mower, and a finger-nail clipper.
Table-ized A.I.
Yet another example of technology outstripping society and out collective wisdom.
.
... create one from scratch. But don't screw with the brain / mind of another living being, no matter how primitive or insignificant you claim it to be.
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should
Indeed, a wise society is one that can do something, yet chooses not to and offers their reasoning for others to contemplate.
I am not particularly religious, ie I don't identify with organised religion. However I do believe in the sanctity of life, and I know that these experiments are fundamentally wrong , no matter what justification you choose to attach to them. They go way beyond normal experimentation, because they directly affect consciousness, and this type of experimentation on a mind is not something that I can ethically deal with, nor is any product based on the same type of process.
If people want artificial intelligence, then fine
Nearly 200 responses and nobody has asked if it runs Linux.
For a moment there, I thought you were going to say,
~Idarubicin
Hmmm. Yes, this is the line of thinking I was on here. In the simplest terms, brains are biological computers comprised of neurons rather than transistors. As this technology progresses, researchers will grow more adept at cultivating neural tissues and configuring them for better performance/lower production cost, just as chip manufacturers do. Though the technology is in it's infancy, I see a new industry beginning here, one that makes chips from living proteins instead of silicon wafers. As to the advantages of using living tissue over silicon, I don't know what that would be.
What gets me are the ethical questions that are raised by this kind of research. Given time for the technology to mature, what happens if we produce a sentient cybernetic organism? Or will there be "safeguards" incorporated into the design to forestall this eventuality, in effect lobotimizing the "devices" before the fact. It's very Asimov-ian. Yeah, I know my neural network is going way out on a limb, but the ethical implications of further commoditizing animal tissue are a bit unsettling.
And yes, I am a vegetarian...
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
imagine a world where your brain is worth more outside your body
Considering the typical body of the average Slashdotter, I'd say that's probably already true.
I believe the Australians have already have run simulations of heavily armed rebel kangaroos in the outback.
About kangaroos and bazookas.
It seems that an american company, which shall remain nameless because some friends of mine were working there at the time, was trying to sell a battlefield simulation program to the Australian military. The intent was to integrate it with some flight-simulators so that the Aussie pilots could have a realistic battlefield with simulations of some of the semi-random events that surround and confuse real battles to fly through.
In order to try to put on a more effective sales presentation, the orders came down to customize it -- which meant building some distinctly australian things into the system in order to impress upon the militarish folk reviewing the system that (A) the system could be quickly and easily reconfigured or altered, and (B), the company was *REALLY* serious about making this sale.
So, Australian fauna was coded in -- in particular, kangaroos. The 'roos represented a real concern for possibly confusing pilots, because they have an upright posture, they're about man-sized, and they move *fast*. If you're not paying attention, or if you're looking mainly at IR traces in a night-fight, it could be pretty easy to confuse them with soldiers.
The shop used Object-Oriented programming - a technique in which each 'object type' is a subtype of some more fundamental type. This saves work because you can 'inherit' behaviors and constraints from the more fundamental type, and write new code only for the stuff that's actually different. In the case of the kangaroos, they 'inherited' from ground troopers (the base type for most of the non-aircraft in the simulation), and put in different data for returning an image, to make them look like kangaroos. They put in different parameters for movement, to make them faster than humans (a lot faster). They used the "not under orders/cut off from c-cubed-i" methods for troopers as the primary methods for the 'roos, to simulate that they didn't have objectives or strategies, and they set their morale to 'low' because mobs of kangaroos don't hang together or fight panic the way platoons of human soldiers do.
They got orders to include kangaroos about forty-eight hours before the scheduled demo, and did it in one night. They figured they were all set.
So, cut past the sales presentation and into the demo. Some pretty high-up officer from the Aussie air force is seated in the flight simulator, flying over this simulated battlefield in his simulated aircraft, and admiring all the simulated details.
And he spots a mob of kangaroos.
So, just to see how they'll react, he buzzes the 'roos. They scatter, of course, bounding away at a realistic kangaroo top-speed in a dozen different directions. The officer laughs, turns his airplane around to get a good look at how that's working, and then gets a nasty surprise. It seems that some of the kangaroos had regrouped, ducked around a nearby ridge and set up an ambush for him using surface-to-air missiles. He didn't see them, so around the ridge he went looking for them - and then he gets a shriek on his missile-detecting radar and the next second his simulated plane turns into a great big simulated fireball.
Yup.... the guys never quite managed to override that 'response to attack' method. Just forgot, I guess. And didn't see it in testing because they never actually *buzzed* the mob of 'roos and then got back into missile range.
The unexpected thing? The officer was delighted. He'd been looking for a way to get his pilots trained to leave the damn mobs of kangaroos alone. He forbade the americans to fix the 'error'. And the Australians actually bought that system, complete with bazooka-packing kangaroos.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
... Humans self organize and process signals in completely unconscious structures with no sense of pleasure. Humans like the hair dresser, plumber, or IT professional for instance. Self organisation and signal processing is what humans do. We've known for some time that certain types of electrical stimulation (cattle prods) can strengthen a connection where as others (free booze) can weaken a connection. But how this turns into cities and countries, we don't have a clue.
Tired of SQL? Try a true relational database:
Somewhere in Florida, 25,000 disembodied rat neurons are thinking about flying an F-22.
It's just such a great hook.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I should preface this question with the information that I have abosolutely no medical training, nor have I any real understanding of how brain neurons operate. That being said, please be kind in your responses.
.
How are the organic neurons being kept alive in this petrie dish? Surely they would have to have a blood supply or something similar to exist. If they can just live in saline solution or something like that, how it is that possible? Especially given that they are working neurons, not just sitting there doing nothing.
Can they reproduce? (I think I read somewhere that brain cells do actually reproduce, in contrast to the traditional thinking for many years). The actual article says they are:
growing on top of a multi-electrode array
Are there any implications for brain neuron transplants as a result of this type of research?
How are the neurons hooked together? Are they wired up, using impossibly thin wires, or just connected via the array?
What the hell is a multi-electrode array anyway?
Anyway, I guess they are enough questions, although I could probably sit here all day typing away at the million queries this type of research presents me with.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
I believe in the "sanctity" of "life", and I think it's wrong to put one person's heart inside another person's chest. If you want to give someone a working heart, fine, but grow one "from scratch". I "know" transplants are just "wrong".
I believe in the "sanctity" of "life", and I think it's wrong to give one person the blood of another. If you need blood to save someone's life, then create blood "from scratch". I "know" transfusions are just "wrong".
I believe in the "sanctity" of "life", and I think it's wrong to perform artificial insemination. If you want to help people who are trying to have children, you should er... create a child from scratch? Or maybe just pray for them (a lot)? Anyway, I "know" IVF is just "wrong".
Guess what, creating those things "from scratch" is very, very hard. And assuming someone put the time and effort into it and created them, what then? A neuron would still be a neuron, whether it came from a brain or from a test tube. And if your problem is with the (abstract) "mind", then how do you manage to turn off your PC? A modern computer, running a modern OS, displays more "intelligent" behaviour than many insects. Is a "mind" any less "sacred" if it's silicon-based, instead of carbon-based?
These experiments are very much right, and should have been done a long time ago. Modern medicine can do amazing things with muscle and bone and skin, but nearly all nervous and neural diseases are impossible to cure or even treat. A lot more research is needed.
Neurons are no more "sacred" than any other cell type (spermatozoons, for example). In fact, millions of both are wasted every second.
Just because a lettuce can't scream that doesn't mean it can't feel. Think about that next time you have a salad. At least some cows want to be eaten.
From other sources I've read (magazine articles, SF stories, etc.), I think the neurons will generally try to "stabilise" the input signal. So I suspect a plane flying straight produces no input, or a flat wave, while a change of direction introduces a change in the signal (ex., voltage or frequency increases as the angle gets steeper).
;)
The network eventually "learns" what signal it should output to stabilise its input and either forms separate groups to handle each direction (up, down, left, right), or just one complex network, where changing one input can actually have some impact on unrelated outputs, but things eventually balance themselves by feedback (cybernetics).
Or maybe they just connected a keyboard to some of the neurons and typed "y0u r t3h n00bz0r", whenever it strayed off course.
Next, they'll hook it up to a Midi board and teach it to sing Puttin' On the Ritz.
To a politician, one email equals one voter.
So this neural net is creating new synapsis and is essencially learning to fly. Now I myself am wondering the extent of the ability of it's growth...Does it remember patterns? can you train it to fly an obstacle course? Just to what extent can it learn? Will it become aware of what it is doing or is it just a set of neurons that have made the appropriate connections to beable to keep a simulated plane from crashing...I can just here greenpeace shouting that humans are playing god again...
or perhaps, a living computer?
Sure, I'd gladly give my brain to this research, or at least some animal's brain. If I have to give a random animal's life so I can have a cool computer that barks like a dog, then so be it, I'm brave and humble enough to make that sacrifice.
Actually, for purity purposes, let's just kidnap some girl off the streets and use her.
"Oh, no, how dare you say that! These fine people are WAY too moral to do something as disgusting a revolting as that! It's just... Oh, wait. Hold on a sec, my cell phone is meowing."
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
Even taking your broad stroke of "animals" as non-human animals, that statement is worthless - at present, there is no way to define what you're talking about, much less measure it once it has been defined.
If animals are self-aware, the only conclusion you can draw is that they don't seem to have a way to communicate it to us. If they aren't, they can't communicate it to us no matter what. And that's all we know about it.
We do, however, know for a fact that some animals (cats and dogs are good examples here) evidence just about every segment of the spectrums of emotions that we do, and that they can be quite calculating with regard to obtaining results that benefit them.
Animals deeply pine after long-time companions (animal and human) who are no longer around. They love and they hate. They lust, they sneak, they pull practical jokes, they play, sacrifice themselves, mope, use tools, trust, distrust, defend territory and friends, and so on through an amazing spectrum of supposedly definitive human characteristics. And let us not forget that they share almost all of our genetic makeup.
So animals may indeed not be conscious, but no sensible alternative explanation for these behaviours has ever been published - and that leaves the issue 100% open.
Right now, the evidence hints towards the likelyhood of non-human animal consciousness - not away. As to what they might do with such a thing, we have no idea. They're not us, and we are not them. It is presumptuous to say otherwise. So they might, indeed, contemplate their place in their world. If so, that process might, or might not, somehow resemble what humans do.
I know of only two venues where statements like yours are taken seriously. Religion and Psi-chi-hat-tricks. Neither are sciences, and neither has any credibility worth talking about except in their own circle of sychophants.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well it's not like there's a shortage of lemmings.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
My hunch is that these could lead to new, smarter bombs, cruise missiles etc., thus reducing armed forces recruitment demands while advancing the cause of the Crusade, which should please the Christian conservatives to no end. They can call the the control modules RABBAI SADs (for RAt Brain Biometrically Adapted Intelligent Stealth Aeronautical Devices), a name which would no doubt score points with the Evangelicals at the polls.
media girl
sorry, I think that the Rooster came first. Else the egg would have been useless...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
At what point does a creation like this become considered life?
Dude you almost made me choke my chicken.
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An interesting post - too bad we dont have more discussions like this on slashdot.
Ethical issues are certainly something to be considered - but this does not neccesarily just apply to biological neural networks. I dont see any reason why we shouldnt apply the same concerns to neural networks in software or silicon. Although instinct suggests to me that a biological network is going to be the most similar to the real thing and therefore more likely to offer closer similarities.
My personal take on conciousness is that it is an emergent behaviour. For example imagine a brain that is kept alive- but has never received any sensory input. Its fairly likely that it couldnt be concious - because conciousness requires processes based on accumulated knowledge. Whether that is learned by cause and effect - as a baby learns quickly what actions to get a feed. The more choices we have , the more knowledge we have and the more we are able use these things to effect the world around us or to enjoy the things in the world around us.
It is also important to consider more lowly lifeforms which exhibit conciousness. One of my favorite examples is the "Bower Bird". The bower bird exhibits true creativity. The male bower bird attracts females by collecting colorful petals, butterfly wings and other items. And by arranging these items in a specific way create a beautiful display. (experiments were performed whereby a scientist rearranged pieces - the birds would put them in the correct spot again)
Female birds then select a prospective mate by selecting the nest it finds most appealing.
What this shows is that these birds can be considered truly creative in that they can both create a work whilst also being able to appreciate the work of others.
To me this example highlights the fact that we should not make the mistake of thinking that it is only the larger - higher level animals that exhibit a complex conciousness.
Anyone interested in these kinds of issues and discussions should look at some of the work by Daniel C Dennet
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/biblio.htm
In particular his book
"Conciousness Explained"
Nick...
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... is a little voice going:
"Help, please kill me..."
The brain is fully functional even when sliced in two, however it does lead to some really fascinating side effects brought about by the differing functions of the two sides.
In effect, we all have two brains, they do different things but by communication we end up with a single whole brain, once you cut the CC you're back to two brains, with different capabilities. Most of the time you won't notice the difference because the brains compensate adequately, but in certain situations you can expose some truely bizarre features.
(http://www.schiffermd.com/dualbrain.html)
Here's another interesting link with details about one case which through having an unusual development of language in both sides of the brain the experimenters were able to discover that the two brains (after separation) were vastly different in thier ideas, rigt down to what job the person would like to lead (race car driver vs draghtsman!).
http://www.macalester.edu/~psych/whathap/UBNRP/
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I wonder what it eats.
This time the story comes around again, and it has been embellished even more! It was debunked on Snopes here, back in 1999!
They have invented the ornithopter. Frank Herbert imagined a feudal galactic civilization in the wake of an anti-AI jihad, where technology raced forward in the shadow of the religous edict "thou shalt make no machine in the image of the mind of a man". Artificial intelligences were verboten, but vast augmentations of the human mind were fair game.
On present-day Earth we struggle with similar taboos, like stemcell research. This ratty project points to a vast potential for human/machine interface and learning. After they perfect the training of these resynthesized rat brains for controlling an airplane, they seed their tanks with human nervous stemcells. Once the training regime is "humanized", these flying tissues might be grafted into existing human brains with more stemcells: brain plugins. We might grow various motorskills, like flying, driving, or space navigation, simultaneously in tanks, while we train our "default" brains a more oldfashioned way, then plug them all in to "graduate".
All those old pictures of "future humans" showed our descendants with big cranium globes. Lots of us have laughed at those pics, because past evolution trends towards bigger skulls have probably stopped with human siezure of our own reproduction. But maybe those big skulls are just artificial expansion bays...
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make install -not war
Is while some of the popular paths they take can lead to something academically interesting they often don't lead to significantly better understanding, nor really useful.
You stick a bunch of neurons to a computer and after a period of training it does _mostly_ what you want. But once they get to a certain stage of complexity, they don't really know why it works that way - they can't summarize/simplify things (no E=MC^2). It's more like alchemy of old. Stir in a bunch of stuff, and you while know that A+B gets you C but you don't know much else.
Doh stick neurons together and they can learn. Oh wow... Like we didn't know that already. Poke a needle in a frog and it twitches.
Sure you will still have to experiment with neurons, I'm not saying stop science. But lots of this is not good science, nor necessary either (it's only necessary so the scientist can publish some paper and get grants etc).
Sure Alchemy developed into Chemistry and other sciences. But maybe this time scientists knowing what they do should be a bit more scientific, given the possible far-reaching impact of their work. The path many are taking is just like mixing random brews and hoping it works. Hope we skip the consuming mercury, uranium part etc.
As is, for many of the things being researched, we might as well use existing animals as they are, or augment them accordingly instead. For instance, you could use a bunch of trained dolphins in shift to help control and process sonar for a submarine. Same for using dogs to sniff for explosives. It really isn't that hard. You can already interface brains with computers already. In short there are tons of existing prepackaged neurons + supporting "hardware" that do much of what we want.
The dolphins/dogs will get bored? Sure, but once you start using tons of neurons hooked up in complex interlinks (for more features) how'd you know what will happen either, or what is actually happening? Cruel to the dolphins? Maybe. But how about those neurons?
Many animals are pretty good at what they do. And they have very similar requirements to humans (which often means they are well suited to helping us). We can relate to them and they can relate to us (in our limited ways).
If you wire up an animal, you know it is hurting if you are do something bad to it. Whether that is necessary in the big picture is for us to decide, but at least we know we are doing something bad to it.
Whereas if you just keep chucking together more and more neurons together and create symbiotes with rather different requirements and perceptions, things might not be so good, nor go as well.
Just because something is legal doesn't mean it isn't wrong. Anyone who actually spends some time with animals will soon realize that they do have emotions and personalities and other hallmarks of self. To subject them to unnecessary pain and suffering is morally wrong. If using animals as a resource, they should enjoy decent living conditions and a quick and painless death.