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Sigh.
So it turns out we've mapped the neural connectome of Drosophila *and simulated it in silico*.
Pop-sci explainer here:
Key quote: "The step from a complete connectome to a working computational brain model is not trivial." And there's an even more important finding in this screenshot (alt text via OCR):
"The wiring is the computation".
/1
@cstross they're putting bugs in computers now!
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@Antiqueight Naah, the ice crystals forming in your synapses would mush them into un-digitizable soup.
@cstross You can tell I've kept up with the technology - they haven't resolved that yet??!?
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But I'm REALLY HAPPY right now because this kinda-sorta validates the key premise of the SF novel I just handed in last month (which involves serial reincarnation via destructive brain-slicing-and-imaging then imprinting onto an immature cortex, and then explores its disastrous societal failure modes).
... And it also hints that artificial consciousness might, eventually, be possible, if only via the hard path of doing it the same way we do it, only in simulation in silico.
/6 (ends)
@cstross Dancing rodents for your manuscript.
But even apart from that, this would have been impossible not that long ago. Truly incredible
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@cstross "the wiring is the computer" is not too surprising. Years ago playing w/ algorithms for FPGA, needed to invent a bit-string perfect hash table. One way of doing a perfect hash function/table involves a matrix and offset, H = Mx + v, but our math needed to be boolean (AND, XOR), a "1" coefficient was a wire, and if we wanted a one-cycle hash index, then we needed no more 1's in a row than maximum inputs to an FPGA XOR. So, a sparse boolean matrix. The wiring was the computation..
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... The next step on from Drosophila, the mouse brain, is 560 times larger—never mind a vastly more complex human brain. And to get the murine connectome we'll have to chop up *a lot* of brains: a human upload won't pass any kind of medical ethics review at this point!
But near-term, it's expected to yield "fundamentally new architectural principles for AI systems that are more sample-efficient, more robust, and more capable of behavioral generalization than current approaches"
/5
RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/116210321731463885
BTW, we can already preserve a large-mammal-scale connectome after death: https://www.brainpreservation.org/tech-prize/
Related, if you haven't seen AMC's Pantheon, you might want to take a look. It involves uploaded human intelligence via destructive brain scan.
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Sigh.
So it turns out we've mapped the neural connectome of Drosophila *and simulated it in silico*.
Pop-sci explainer here:
Key quote: "The step from a complete connectome to a working computational brain model is not trivial." And there's an even more important finding in this screenshot (alt text via OCR):
"The wiring is the computation".
/1
@cstross Interesting; I've suspected that the first AGI would have to be modeled after our own brain and would have to go through the same growing and learning and sensory feedback loops we do, and at probably the same rate we do. Any benefit of an AGI, over a human, would be inherent to the medium (cloning, save/restore) and not innately super intelligence. It would also come with its own challenges and limitations (no human has ever lived 200 years, would recall become a limiting factor?).
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Sigh.
So it turns out we've mapped the neural connectome of Drosophila *and simulated it in silico*.
Pop-sci explainer here:
Key quote: "The step from a complete connectome to a working computational brain model is not trivial." And there's an even more important finding in this screenshot (alt text via OCR):
"The wiring is the computation".
/1
that's... interesting.
but can someone make an asic of this brain and get it to run doom
on debian linux
with an xfce desktop environment? -
Sigh.
So it turns out we've mapped the neural connectome of Drosophila *and simulated it in silico*.
Pop-sci explainer here:
Key quote: "The step from a complete connectome to a working computational brain model is not trivial." And there's an even more important finding in this screenshot (alt text via OCR):
"The wiring is the computation".
/1
@cstross Considering I'm re-reading Iain M. Banks right now, this is quite relevant, though I'm struggling to remember what book it was that had the "if you simulate perfectly every neurone" argument for sentience of drones.
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Another interesting line of research would be how that connectome of 127k neurones is specified in DNA that encodes about 14k genes.
There's some *really* impressive "compression" going on there.
it's a base 4 system, since you can have adenine-thymine, thymine-adenine, cytosine-guanine and guanine-cytosine pairs, so automatically you're storing far more information within a single place value compared to binary.
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But I'm REALLY HAPPY right now because this kinda-sorta validates the key premise of the SF novel I just handed in last month (which involves serial reincarnation via destructive brain-slicing-and-imaging then imprinting onto an immature cortex, and then explores its disastrous societal failure modes).
... And it also hints that artificial consciousness might, eventually, be possible, if only via the hard path of doing it the same way we do it, only in simulation in silico.
/6 (ends)
Kind of the backstory for @gregeganSF's "Permutation City" scaled down a few dozen orders of magnitude.
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@mwl Also very cool, the Indian sci/tech news website that ran that feature! (From the writing style I initially thought it might be AI slop, but no: Indian English is just a bit different.)
@cstross Oh, so that wasn't just me.
Between that and the crawler at the top I had to give up trying to read it. A shame, it seemed interesting.
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RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/116210321731463885
BTW, we can already preserve a large-mammal-scale connectome after death: https://www.brainpreservation.org/tech-prize/
Related, if you haven't seen AMC's Pantheon, you might want to take a look. It involves uploaded human intelligence via destructive brain scan.
@BoydStephenSmithJr If that's TV or film, I can't cope with TV or film. (Fucked eyeballs *and* a dose of what is probably AuDHD that means I don't have the attention span, either.)
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@cstross Interesting; I've suspected that the first AGI would have to be modeled after our own brain and would have to go through the same growing and learning and sensory feedback loops we do, and at probably the same rate we do. Any benefit of an AGI, over a human, would be inherent to the medium (cloning, save/restore) and not innately super intelligence. It would also come with its own challenges and limitations (no human has ever lived 200 years, would recall become a limiting factor?).
@zimzat You haven't read "Saturn's Children", have you? (Hint: I wrote it in 2007; it made the Hugo shortlist for best novel.)
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Sigh.
So it turns out we've mapped the neural connectome of Drosophila *and simulated it in silico*.
Pop-sci explainer here:
Key quote: "The step from a complete connectome to a working computational brain model is not trivial." And there's an even more important finding in this screenshot (alt text via OCR):
"The wiring is the computation".
/1
@cstross So, if the behaviors and functions of a fruit fly brain arise not simply because you mash a whole bunch of neurons together and hope for the best but because of billions of years of natural selection, that to me is a precisely delivered bullet straight through the hear of the idea that current LLM-based "Ai" will yield human-like consciousness if only we make the models big enough.
Also, I'd be remiss if I didn't add: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
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But I'm REALLY HAPPY right now because this kinda-sorta validates the key premise of the SF novel I just handed in last month (which involves serial reincarnation via destructive brain-slicing-and-imaging then imprinting onto an immature cortex, and then explores its disastrous societal failure modes).
... And it also hints that artificial consciousness might, eventually, be possible, if only via the hard path of doing it the same way we do it, only in simulation in silico.
/6 (ends)
@cstross So it seems this could be the beginning of cortical stacks development, isn't it?
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@cstross thanks for sharing this!
It also shows how and why LLMs are a dead end.
It doesn't mean LLMs are a dead end, even though yeah they probably are.
It means that the way LLMs "reason", or whatever the heck you want to call it, is not at some fundamental level the way meat brains do it. We are more "hardware" (or firmware or wetware or whatever) at the basic level than software/state.
Don't be too excited. It is *highly unlikely* that evolution builds brains in an optimal manner. It may well be we eventually build our own successors. We just won't (quickly/soon) build better "us"es.
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@BoydStephenSmithJr If that's TV or film, I can't cope with TV or film. (Fucked eyeballs *and* a dose of what is probably AuDHD that means I don't have the attention span, either.)
@cstross It is TV. Sorry you can't enjoy it that way. I believe it is based on "The Gods ..." series by Ken Liu, if you can find that in print or audiobook. I've not read that series.
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... The next step on from Drosophila, the mouse brain, is 560 times larger—never mind a vastly more complex human brain. And to get the murine connectome we'll have to chop up *a lot* of brains: a human upload won't pass any kind of medical ethics review at this point!
But near-term, it's expected to yield "fundamentally new architectural principles for AI systems that are more sample-efficient, more robust, and more capable of behavioral generalization than current approaches"
/5
@cstross maybe a Trump brain wouldn’t be that much more complex than a fruit fly, though I’m not sure it’s useful if we’re looking for replicating a decent human being’s processing.
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