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Brain Cells Fused with Computer Chips
valamaldoran writes "Looks like organic computers aren't too far off. Live Science has an interesting article about fusing brain neurons with silicon chips. From the article: 'The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons.'"
Seems like programming for a neural network would have much of the same difficulties as quantum computing, only without the considerable advantage of computing power that quantum computing provides. Let's be honest, they just want to get in our brraaiinns..
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
Neurochips will replace up to 10,000 neurons in brains damaged by Alzheimer's and stroke: One day, a computer chip may do some of the work of a damaged hippocampus. check out Dr. Theodore W. Berger, University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
the brain has billions of neurons, so this will still be small scale...
i disable sigs
I guess it won't belong before resistance is futile.
Some might remember this statement. It was said when they started decyphering the human genome.
Just because we can "read" the letters doesn't mean we know what's written. Just because we can pump electricity into nerve cells doesn't mean we understand how they "think". It's still a long, long road to cyberpunk.
Well, at least the technology aspect of this flavor of SciFi. The social aspect is almost achived.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The model and procedure for making the many parts of our body is encoded in our DNA. If we just drop in a a chip how can the body know to interact with it? Unless our genes are rewritten to include driver software (heh!) then the only likely result will be a mucus surface forming around the inorganic material, rather like a pearl forming around a piece of grit. At the basic level everything is done in terms of shuffling chemicals around. There is no "master planner" who will integrate our new chip capabilities (64-bit floating point maths or something) into the normal functioning of our brains.
the layman's guide to computer science
Will it run Linux? And if so, just imagine a beowulf cluster of these organic computers!
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... this will lead to some kind of brain O/S elitism Having said that I don't think I would be using Microsoft Windows Seizure Edition.
Even if one of these was implanted into the brain of a woman, you can still bet that no-one would be able to write a manpage for her. ;.;
Don't take the above poster too seriously. He doesn't.
Looks like the ride toward the singularity just picked up its pace.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
"I have a headache due to high CPU usage. would you like to:
a. Shut down some applications.
b. Let me sleep for a while and get back to you.
c. Get me some Aspirin already!"
Membrane potentials (literally voltages measurable from one side of a membrane to another) can tell you what is going on in a neuron. In fact there are so many electrical signals inside a brain that a simple device like an EEG can tell you quite a bit about what is going on.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That this would give a new meaning to the term "Brainfreeze"
=|
While it's a long way off, there's possible problems with it just as there's problems with almost all tech these days. An example, Illyan from the Vorkosigan series:
In the book Memory (by Lois McMaster Bujold) we see a man with an "eidetic memory chip" in his head. Technology is far along advanced that this effectively is a huge hard drive, giving this man perfect memory of everything for the 20 years or so that he's had it in. He's then hit by something which screws up the chip in his head; and since his brain has come to rely on it as memory storage, he starts getting scrambled memories, and acts as if they were real, losing touch with reality.
I know it's a long way off and a bit extreme... but we can only hope that the early adopters will have some protection against failure and/or bugs and/or malice.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
You're right in that this does not come close to having the number of neurons needed to help in disseminated diseases like Alzheimers. Where it might have promise sooner is in cases of severe locallized injury, such as spinal damage strokes from a small clot, or damaged nerves in an amputation/partial amputation type injury.
We have yet to succeed except in a few lab experiments in regrowing neural tissue. Stem cells might help, but then again might not. Any means to reconnect damaged neurons could have profound impacts on the treatment of some types of injury. This is especially true since this particular method would avoid much of the moral/ethical wrangling involved in the use of stem cells.
Using plain ol' text since 1968
Well I for one welcome our new cyborg overlords.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Fast-Forward into Cyberpunk. Not the friendly Gibson kind, but one with intrusive neural interfaces. People showing clear signs of severe mental deseases but reporting from of the Network that they feel superb and can sense when the stockmarket is about to shift. They are so powerfull they're not even interested in money anymore and experience enjoyments mere mortals can't even dream of. They can slow down time and play WoW 12 live. Their bodies are bloated, drooling, twitching pieces of flesh, with eyeballs turned inward, watched by carebots. It's the better option than just occasionly jacking in and experiencing severe borderline like disorders by trying to cope with the real world when not logged in. Normal programmers are extinct, because these humans interfaced with machines do the jobs to get free acccess everywhere and they do them 10.000 times better than anybody else.
The question:
Would you get yourself a neural jack and hook up?
I wouldn't.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Do we really want blond computers?
Your lack of faith disturbs me.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Actually, I'm not sure you're exactly correct. Ever caught a ball somebody threw to you? That's some hardcore calculus right there. Just because you're not aware that your brain is crunching numbers doesn't mean that it isn't. In fact, at a basic level, I guess that imagination is just some rapid number crunching.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
I can, even without a computer, predict that the planets will still revolve around the sun in a few 1000 years, and you can rather easily calculate how much mass they should gain/lose by impact of meteors. It's a game of probability.
On a smaller scale, you're far harder pressed. Weather is pretty well predictable on a large scale. It's still near impossible on small scales. How is the weather going to be in Hicksville in 15 days? It's near impossible to tell that, while it's easy to say that within the next $years years a huge $desaster is going to wash over $continent.
Same with brains. Yes, you can tell that certain areas are responsible for certain activities. Yes, you can "stimulate" them to gain some effect. More or less reliably. It is MUCH harder to stimulate certain cells to get a very specific effect. That kind of research is still at the very beginning, and as much as I'd like to see computers controlled by brains, it's not going to happen soon.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1. It will only think Microsoft Thoughts.
2. It will only think one thought at a time, unless you buy MS Brain Enterprise Server
3. Sometimes, it will stop thinking. The human will need to be killed and brought back with the paddles. This will be considered normal.
4. Windows software will suddenly make sense.
5. All your thoughts will be covered under DRM. You can share thoughts with up to three other people, but only if you are in a connected wireless area and your thoughts can register their new owners.
6. You may live longer, but large parts of your life will be spent watching a blue bar slowly crawl across your field of vision.
7. All sex will be done by oblique references. Nudity will not exist in any form other than pixilated and blurred images.
8. There will be Open Source brains -- called "Open Minds" but the people who choose them will be considered insane and untrusted by the rest of the MS Brain using world. These people will be locked away in insane asylums.
9. There will be Apple OS-X brains. The people who choose this will be seen as misguided flower children, wandering in airports with be smiles and preaching their message of peace and good music. They will be largely ignored.
10. There will be <>(@!*@($&&) * [[<< 0x000000BE or ATTEMPTED_WRITE_TO_READONLY_MEMORY >>]]
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I really doubt it.
Children learn to catch a ball through trial and error, over time they notice what they need to do to succeed. It's not calculus, it's just that experience allows them to predict where the ball will end up. They aren't doing calculations they have just seen enough balls thrown to be able to make a prediction because they have seen how a ball travels when thrown. Just like children learn that screaming gets the TV to display their favourite show, and that flipping the light switch makes the lights turn on and off - they don't know the mechanism they've just done it enough to be able to make a prediction based on past behaviours.
For a more thorough treatment on the subject, check out ISBN 0-553-38343-4
"Give away the stone, let the oceans take and transmutate this cold and faded anchor." - Maynard James Keenan
Lynch mobs? WTF are you smoking?
20 years ago the RIAA coerced the government into taxing blank tapes, because that was the most sophisticated copy protection they had at their disposal. No one rioted. There were no "lynchings" to speak of. People bent over and took it. Some even said it was fair (not me.)
2X years later, more sophisticated tech in "experiencing" music leads to a higher bar of tolerance by the average person in accepting these copy-protection methods. DRM gets implemented, most people bend over and take it. Some even say it is fair (not me.)
You're suffering from a misguided delusion that people in the REAGAN ERA were somehow less docile than people today. I'm guessing that 20 years ago, you were in diapers.
It helps no one to argue that we need to revert back to a time that never existed.