[HN Gopher] A connectomic study of a petascale fragment of human... ___________________________________________________________________ A connectomic study of a petascale fragment of human cerebral cortex Author : lawrenceyan Score : 54 points Date : 2022-01-16 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (vcg.seas.harvard.edu) (TXT) w3m dump (vcg.seas.harvard.edu) | epgui wrote: | This is incredible work! | matthewfcarlson wrote: | There was a story I read once where general AI was unobtainable | but computing power continued so simulations of brains was done | via processing brain slices. So every AI was just a person who | had died with an intact brain that could be preserved. Self | driving cars were a thing but it was someone's grandma. | wallacoloo wrote: | if you can recall the author/title i'd love to look at it! i'm | curious how the story deals with the disjointed sensory input | in the "revived" agent. e.g. does Grandma experience | sight/sound/touch/feel? if not, how does she cope with sudden | full-body paralysis/numbness/loss-of-familiar-senses? did she | agree to this, or know it was going to happen? and so on. | | i remember one subplot to a Cory Doctorow book focused on a lab | that was trying to develop a self-aware machine and the barrier | there was that the machine would commit suicide as soon as it | understood the broader context of its being. sort of makes me | wonder that in order to achieve the sorts of AI you're talking | about, we need not just map the brain but also understand (or | bruteforce) enough of it to avoid agent crises. the barrier to | that _could_ be larger than just developing a wholly new neural | network (idk). | klysm wrote: | How is that different from general AI though? | robbedpeter wrote: | General ai would be a unique mind. Simulation doesn't require | engineers to understand the process, just that the process | works. I can copy a mechanism without scientifically | understanding what that mechanism is doing. I can follow a | recipe or instructable or copy grandma's brain and have | little to no understanding of what's really happening. | | Then again, if you can copy a genius researcher and put a | million of the minds to work on solving agi methodically, you | don't need precision and understanding to start with. You | just hope the million mind genius collective doesn't lie or | mislead. | quocanh wrote: | It would be General Intelligence but it's probably not | Artificial General Intelligence in so much as the | intelligence aspect wasn't designed and created. It also | wouldn't be able to get smarter at the rate of singularity | since its intelligence comes from using humans as raw | material. | The_rationalist wrote: | blamazon wrote: | Amusing how they (minimally) protected the identity of the | individual standing on a roller chair in the main illustration. | lawrenceyan wrote: | The dataset the paper uses: 1.4 petabyte browsable reconstruction | of the human cortex - | https://h01-release.storage.googleapis.com/landing.html | KhoomeiK wrote: | It's simply a matter of scaling this slice-scan-render technique | up to the entirety of a human brain to simulate human thinking, | correct? What're the biggest technological hurdles left? | danielmorozoff wrote: | pretty much everything. Connectome != functional understanding | of the brain. We have had c elegans ( worm) and more recently | fly connectomes for years. we are still struggling to | understand basic logic encodings in those animal models. Imho | we lack a foundational understanding of the logic encoding | mechanisms in the brain. Many neuroscientists/ computer | scientists are working on this problem, but to my knowledge we | are still not there. | JulianMorrison wrote: | Perhaps someone has been reading Anders Sandberg[1]? | | 1. https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/brain-emulation-roadmap-report.pdf | josemanuel wrote: | Was this done for the first time? Is there any novel technology | that enabled this? Why are these studies rare? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-16 23:00 UTC)