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Neuromorphic computing


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My partner was talking to me about artificial intelligence the other day, and I asked them why it is that all of the AI up until now that supposedly learn like a biological brain would, seem well, kinda slow.

And the answer I got was, we don't have computers powerful enough.

Powerful enough? I thought about this to myself, sat with my computer happily sucking enough power out of the wall to give me the shock of a lifetime and it occurred to me - I'm only running on a banana and a cup of tea! How can my brain function on so little, and my computer couldn't even hope to even emulate the cognitive function of a toddler?

So I got thinking about it and a lot of it has to do with the hardware, you know a brain has all these neurons that are working at the same time, wheras a computer chip is this central thing that does one instruction at a time, it occurred to me that, maybe the issue has nothing to do with software at all, but rather the hardware that makes up our computer.

Down the rabbit hole I went and I discovered the subject of Neuromorphic computing - Well what is that? turns out there are engineers out there right now designing chips to function just like the human brain with neurons and synapses, and these chips have the same sort of efficiency as the human brain too!  There's all sorts of reading and videos on it and it seems like an interesting field.

I'm thinking if we get to a stage where we can essentially just print 'brains on a chip' - Sure all the use cases everyone is talking about is business but lets be real the hardware is emulating a human brain, what's to stop someone well.. using the human brain to do human brain things? Could we create not-so-artificial sentient life? Could I turn my alt into a sentient being that lives in the matrix? Seems interesting to me :)

 

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16 minutes ago, Extrude Ragu said:

but lets be real the hardware is emulating a human brain,

Not quite... the brain works in a different way to the basic on/off/(tristate) method of a chip, but the real difference is in the learning process. That doesn't happen overnight, it takes years. Have a read of people like Susan Greenfield and William H Calvin for how the underlying mechanisms seem to work. Yes, I agree, it could be done, Southampton University began researching protein computing twenty years ago, but as yet, there's nothing on the marketplace.

Personally, I feel some anguish at the thought of all those dogs and cats and parrots who are going to be abandoned if the people trying to build carer robots manage to succeed, so I do have a side to take in the biological versus engineered intelligence debate.

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