Sigh.
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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:
Whole Brain Emulation Achieved: Scientists Run a Fruit Fly Brain in Simulation | RathBiotaClan
Scientists ran a real fruit fly brain in simulation using the FlyWire connectome, achieving the first working whole brain emulation.
RathBiotaClan (www.rathbiotaclan.com)
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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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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@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.
@Legit_Spaghetti Er, are you sure you understand how evolution works? And the difference between a genetically fixed brain plan and one whose developmental plan includes variable neuronal migration as an inherent part of the process?
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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.
@breathOfLife @petealexharris @cstross Plus, some genes can overlap, so you can get a lot more instructional data in the same length of base-4 values than it seems.
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Heh heh.
Looper - You should go to China.
Looper (2012)© Sony Pictures Digital Productions Inc. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276104/http://www.loopermovie.com/Abe: This time travel crap, just fries y...
YouTube (www.youtube.com)
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Someone commented that now we've uploaded a fly brain it can eat virtual shit long after the rest of us are a distant memory.
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@cstross
But I suppose I'm talking about myself really. I don't mean that a scientist researching this stuff can't be kind. I mean that to me, going down the rabbit hole of the technical details of how a creature's mind works is not compatible with treating the creature as a being.I rescue flies if they get stuck in water. I hate this research.
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@cstross @mwl Heh, well, guess I'm doomed to ignorance.
FWIW the writing itself was not an absolute block. The combo of crawler and writing (and maybe just being generally unfocused) had to all drag me down.
But, um, Mandarin... I'll have to wait for the paid journos to bring those to light.
It's all just as well, really. Breakthroughs today are not likely to see general application within the years I have left.
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@pwassonchat@eldritch.cafe @cstross@wandering.shop @mwl@io.mwl.io
I'm not surprised by this at all
after getting asked to "please do the needful" by some indian clients at an old job on a bunch of emails I had to figure the origin of the phrase
Turns out it is a remament of old UK English that fell out of use elsewhere but still survives in Indian-English, as opposed to any sort of English as a second language grammatical "error", there were a bunch of other examples as well -
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@cstross So it seems this could be the beginning of cortical stacks development, isn't it?
@eldadoinquieto No.
This is evidence of three things:
- the connectome doesn't generalize
- the entire developmental pathway is required to get from the fusion of gametes to the organism
- how the organism functions is developmentally dependentThis matches current biology; developmental plasticity and selection explain how we've got what we see across life, including all of our own capabilities.
There's some reason to believe we can't comprehend this well enough to apply design.
