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Category: robotics/AI – Page 55

Studies on animal minds suggest consciousness is not computation

We’re often seduced by the idea that the mind is a computer, and that consciousness is just a matter of running the right code. But philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith, renowned for his work on octopus minds, disagrees. Fresh research into animal minds—from bees to jellyfish—suggests that consciousness arises not from software but from electrical oscillations moving rhythmically across cell membranes in living brains. And those oscillations, Godfrey-Smith argues, are unlikely to be reproducible in artificial hardware. Perhaps, then, only living brains can truly be conscious.

Late in the previous century, there seemed to be good reasons to think that the physical make-up of a system could not matter much to whether that system had a mind. The organization of the system is what matters, people thought, and physically different systems can be organized the same way. As a result, artificial minds making use of ordinary computer hardware should be possible. This whole discussion was hypothetical, because there weren’t any convincing possible cases of artificial minds to worry about.

Since then, two things have happened. From around 2022, we’ve been confronted with candidates for artificial minds that are disturbingly impressive. These are the LLM systems, such as ChatGPT. But reasons have emerged to doubt that the physical make-up of a system is irrelevant and minds are “substrate independent.” A view sometimes called biological naturalism holds that the biological details of nervous systems might make a difference to whether a physical system has a mind. (The term was coined, with this sense at least, by John Searle.) But if nervous systems and brains are special, what is it that makes them special?

Scientists Discover Strange Property of Rice and Turn It Into a Smart Material

Rice behaves in an unexpected way under pressure. When compressed quickly, it becomes weaker, but under slow pressure it stays strong. This insight is helping scientists develop a new material that could be used in “soft” robots that automatically adjust stiffness, as well as protective gear that responds to how fast an impact occurs.

Using this property, researchers created a new type of “metamaterial,” an engineered structure designed to exhibit behaviors not found in natural materials.

Researchers 3D print robot the size of a single-cell organism — devices move and navigate even without a ‘brain,’ uses their shape and the environment to get going

These robots are smaller than a strand of human hair but can move independently even without a motor and sensors.

MICrONS Explorer: A virtual observatory of the cortex

The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICrONS) program seeks to revolutionize machine learning by reverse-engineering the algorithms of the brain. It is an ambitious program to map the function and connectivity of cortical circuits, using high throughput imaging technologies, with the goal of providing insights into the computational principles that underlie cortical function in order to advance the next generation of machine learning algorithms.

This website serves as a data portal to release connectivity and functional imaging data collected by a consortium of laboratories led by groups at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Princeton University, and Baylor College of Medicine, with support from a broad array of teams, coordinated and funded by the IARPA MICrONS program. These data include large scale electron microscopy based reconstructions of cortical circuitry from mouse visual cortex, with corresponding functional imaging data from those same neurons.

Have a Scientific Request? Check out the Virtual Observatory of the Cortex (VORTEX) project, a BRAIN Initiative funded program to bring the MICrONS dataset to the research community. Access proofreading resources to answer your scientific questions.

Reconstructing tumor tissues in 3D: From organoids to bioengineered niches

Tumor tissue engineering has opened new avenues for cancer research. With an emphasis on gastrointestinal malignancies, we summarize capabilities and limitations of patient-derived and engineered organoid models. We then discuss how innovations in biomaterial design, biofabrication, microfluidics, benchmarking, and AI converge to better emulate tumor tissues and advance translational modeling.

Get access to all the best AI models in one place at Mammouth

https://mammouth.ai.

Timestamps:
00:00 — New Way Of Computing
06:46 — How It Works
09:39 — Outlook.

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Small quantum system outperforms large classical networks in real-world forecasting

Can a handful of atoms outperform a much larger digital neural network on a real-world task? The answer may be yes. In a study published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Prof. Peng Xinhua and Assoc. Prof. Li Zhaokai from the University of Science and Technology of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated that a quantum processor comprising just nine interacting spins outperforms classical networks with thousands of nodes in realistic weather forecasting tasks.

By exploiting unique quantum features such as superposition and entanglement, quantum devices offer new ways to represent and process information.

Recent experiments have shown their advantages in specialized benchmark tasks, but extending these gains to real-world applications remains a challenge. In particular, many quantum approaches rely on complex circuits that are difficult to implement accurately on today’s noisy hardware.

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