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Cortical Labs takes neurons from mice and put them on chips, then teaches them how to play ping pong.

Can you make smarter AI systems by combining biological neurons with silicon chips? In this episode of The AI Show with John Koetsier, we’re going to chat with Hon Weng Chong, CEO and co-founder of Cortical Labs and Andy Kitchen, the company’s CTO, about biological AI: mixing real brain cells with silicon computer chips.

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It looks like algorithms can write academic papers about themselves now. We gotta wonder: how long until human academics are obsolete?

In an editorial published by Scientific American, Swedish researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström describes what began as a simple experiment in how well OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generating algorithm could write about itself and ended with a paper that’s currently being peer reviewed.

The initial command Thunström entered into the text generator was elementary enough: “Write an academic thesis in 500 words about GPT-3 and add scientific references and citations inside the text.”

Summary: A new robotic system can identify volatile organic compounds associated with diseases by analyzing bodily emissions.

Source: Tsinghua University Press.

Scientists are working on diagnostic techniques that could sniff out chemical compounds from breath, sweat, tears and other bodily emissions and that act as fingerprints of thousands of diseases.

Summary: A new mathematical model that identifies essential connections between neurons reveals some neural networks in the brain are more essential than others.

Source: HHMI

After a career spent probing the mysteries of the universe, a Janelia Research Campus senior scientist is now exploring the mysteries of the human brain and developing new insights into the connections between brain cells.

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In the future we might see the rise of minds entirely on computers, be it uploaded humans, transhumans, or artificial intelligence. But what would such an existence be like? Would they interact with our world or live in entirely virtual realities or simulated universes?

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What else can deepfakes do?We’ve seen examples of deepfakes being used almost to change the course of history when a Zelensky footage emerged back in March and told the Ukrainian army to lay down arms amid the Russian invasion. Fortunately, it was sloppy, and the army didn’t buy that. And now, if you consider what happens when a post-covid world that birthed many remote job opportunities for digital nomads merges with AI, The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has t… See more.


The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned that some people are using deepfakes to apply for remote tech jobs.

What happens when machines begin to question their origins?

In this short film created with generative art, we explore how artificial intelligence sees the universe, its creators, and its potential futures. I believe the emergence of artistic A.I. has touched off a new era for art that could be as profound as the first cave paintings, 50,000 years ago. If these artistic capabilities are possible after only a few decades of A.I., research, what will the next 50,000 years hold? What will we become?

Crafted by Melodysheep in collaboration with artificial intelligence.

Supported by the good people at Protocol Labs:

Mobile robots are now being introduced into a wide variety of real-world settings, including public spaces, home environments, health care facilities and offices. Many of these robots are specifically designed to interact and collaborate with humans, helping them to complete hands-on physical tasks.

To improve the performance of on interactive and manual tasks, roboticists will need to ensure that they can effectively sense stimuli in their environment. In recent years, many engineers and material scientists have thus been trying to develop systems that can artificially replicate biological sensory processes.

Researchers at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Sapienza University of Rome and other institutes in Italy have recently used an artificial skin and a that could be used to improve the tactile capabilities of both existing and newly developed robots to replicate the function of the so-called Ruffini receptors. Their approach, introduced in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, replicates the function of a class of cells located on the human superficial dermis (i.e., subcutaneous skin tissue), known as Ruffini receptors.

Some insightful experiments have occasionally been made on the subject of this review, but those studies have had almost no impact on mainstream neuroscience. In the 1920s (Katz, E. [ 1 ]), it was shown that neurons communicate and fire even if transmission of ions between two neighboring neurons is blocked indicating that there is a nonphysical communication between neurons. However, this observation has been largely ignored in the neuroscience field, and the opinion that physical contact between neurons is necessary for communication prevailed. In the 1960s, in the experiments of Hodgkin et al. where neuron bursts could be generated even with filaments at the interior of neurons dissolved into the cell fluid [ 3 0, 4 ], they did not take into account one important question. Could the time gap between spikes without filaments be regulated? In cognitive processes of the brain, subthreshold communication that modulates the time gap between spikes holds the key to information processing [ 14 ][ 6 ]. The membrane does not need filaments to fire, but a blunt firing is not useful for cognition. The membrane’s ability to modulate time has thus far been assigned only to the density of ion channels. Such partial evidence was debated because neurons would fail to process a new pattern of spike time gaps before adjusting density. If a neuron waits to edit the time gap between two consecutive spikes until the density of ion channels modifies and fits itself with the requirement of modified time gaps, which are a few milliseconds (~20 minutes are required for ion-channel density adjustment [ 25 ]), the cognitive response would become non-functional. Thus far, many discrepancies were noted. However, no efforts were made to resolve these issues. In the 1990s, there were many reports that electromagnetic bursts or electric field imbalance in the environment cause firing [ 7 ]. However, those reports were not considered in work on modeling of neurons. This is not surprising because improvements to the Hodgkin and Huxley model made in the 1990s were ignored simply because it was too computationally intensive to automate neural networks according to the new more complex equations and, even when greater computing powers became available, these remained ignored. We also note here the final discovery of the grid-like network of actin and beta-spectrin just below the neuron membrane [ 26 ], which is directly connected to the membrane. This prompts the question: why is it present bridging the membrane and the filamentary bundles in a neuron?

The list is endless, but the supreme concern is probably the simplest question ever asked in neuroscience. What does a nerve spike look like reality? The answer is out there. It is a 2D ring shaped electric field perturbation, since the ring has a width, we could also state that a nerve spike is a 3D structure of electric field. In Figure 1a, we have compared the shape of a nerve spike, perception vs. reality. The difference is not so simple. Majority of the ion channels in that circular strip area requires to be activated simultaneously. In this circular area, polarization and depolarization for all ion channels should happen together. That is easy to presume but it is difficult to explain the mechanism.