
Darpa Wants to Build Conscious Robots Using Insect Brains - tylerjwilk00
https://futurism.com/darpa-wants-conscious-robots-insect-brains/
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ppod
> “Furthermore, these organisms are possibly able to display increased
> subjectivity of experience.” It goes on to say that there’s evidence
> suggesting that “even small insects have subjective experiences, the first
> step towards a concept of ‘consciousness.'”

Even if there were such a thing as a coherent definition of "subjectivity of
experience", how on earth could we know if an insect has it? A new level of
consciousness woo woo.

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skywhopper
More importantly... why would you want your robots to be conscious?

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bch
Alternative sensors/controllers?

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317070
The following is not common knowledge, but I'm fairly knowledgeable in the
area so hear me out :)

We thought for a long time that neurons were fairly easy to imitate. After
all, most of what they do seems to be exchanging neurotransmitters, whereas
internally they have an electric potential which is encoding most of their
behaviour. While not easy, individually they are also not super duper complex
compared to say, a microprocessor. Taken from this perspective, it looked like
the main difficulty was in simulating them in large enough quantities to
obtain interesting behaviour.

The argument in the paragraph above is foundational to how we think about
intelligence. There are various other aspects to it, like morphological
intelligence, but the above seems the most relevant when we want to create an
artificial intelligence. While these days there are also more engineering-
focused arguments for why we think artificial neural networks are interesting
for research, underlying there is the idea that the only intelligence we know
is made out of small simple things in large quantities that exchange simple
signals. This is a key thought when you want to use artificial neural networks
to create artificial intelligence. For instance the Human Brain Project in the
EU (cost ~1 Billion EUR) is kind of built on this argument.

Now, and this is very recent research, this foundation is starting to shake
from the biology side. It appears that neurons are also exchanging RNA, trans-
scripting the RNA received into proteins and that those proteins seem to
interfere with the transmission of RNA by the neuron [0]!

That is something completely different from the argument I poned before! In a
computing analogy, every single neuron is a computer which is receiving and
transmitting program code (RNA) and executing code it receives
(transscription) and we know that the program it receives is interfering with
the neurons receiving and transmission of programs to other neurons.

If intelligence does require such complex mechanisms, we are VERY far away
from simulating (or understanding) that at scale.

Now we don't know whether this complexity is necessary. But the old argument
of an upperbound to the level of complexity needed seems to be crumbling too.

All in all, putting some real neurons might prove to be a viable alternative
for creating artificial intelligence, as it might circumvent the problem I
sketched above. It might not, but it at least seems to be a direction worth
exploring as a second bet next to simulating neurons.

[0]
[https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2817%2931...](https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2817%2931504-0)

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TaupeRanger
Knowledgeable skeptics have been voicing concerns about neurons not being the
right level of abstraction to look at for decades. See, most prominently,
Chomsky, and by extension Gallistel.

~~~
petermcneeley
Here is an analysis of Chomsky's opposition to forms of statistical reasoning.
[http://norvig.com/chomsky.html](http://norvig.com/chomsky.html)

Im not familiar with Gallistel.

~~~
gaurav_v
Gallistel wrote a book 'Memory and the Computational Brain,' in which he
argues that neural storage and computation via synaptic strengthening alone is
implausible, and that the brain must have a real read/write memory. He points
out that genetic material is an ideal substrate for such a capacity...

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azaras
It is not a few hundred insect brain something easy to emulate? How can you
say that this brain has conscious and the emulated one not?

~~~
scottlocklin
AFAIK, it's not. Biological brains are rate encoded (very difficult to
efficiently emulate in a Von Neumann machine) and still plenty mysterious. The
last time I checked, sea cucumber nervous systems which are literally only a
few neurons, are difficult to emulate.

There is something called Moravec's paradox -stuff which is hard for smart
people to do, say, playing chess, is reasonably easy for computers to do.
Stuff like controlling musculatures and involving perception and mobility are
really hard for computers to do (as the autonomous vehicle people are finding
out).

I dunno if bug brains will be conscious, but they'll be able to do things
easier than an intel chip.

~~~
kakarot
Could you elaborate on what you mean when you say "rate encoded"?

One aspect of consciousness that I think we will have a hard time nailing down
is the nature of our perception of time and how it aids computation and
awareness.

Von Neumann machines follow predictable cycles, information follows
predictable paths at predictable speeds.

Human brains interpret a wealth of signals simultaneously, with various delays
between each signal, yet our perception is that all of these signals are being
processed at the same time.

You see a ball drop close by and hear a loud slam exactly at the moment it
hits the ground. But sound and vibration travel slower than light, both inside
and outside your organs, and it takes different amounts of time to process
them. We're talking on the order of several milliseconds. But our brain is
able to warp our perception of time, which we still experience as linear, in
such a way that things happening at different times appear to happen
simultaneously. In fact, this phenomenon holds true for up to a ~20-40ms
difference in signal timing before your brain stops trying to compensate for
it. Eventually the ball is so far away that the timing difference between the
audio and visual signal are too great to handle.

Another example is if I were to slap you across the legs. You would likely
hear the slap and experience the sensation of pain at the exact same time,
despite the fact that transmission of information through your pain receptors
and CNS up to your brain is magnitudes slower than transmission of a signal
from your ears to your cortex. Your brain warped your perception of time,
effectively "rewinding the clock", so that you could experience both at the
same time.

This intelligent muxing, sampling and holding of signals is tantamount to our
ability to rapidly react to various situations. I also believe, and this is
just conjecture, that our brains form maps which keep track of which kind of
signals which should be experienced together, and tries to make them
synchronized, running simulations which adjust its timing, similar to how your
motor neurons simulate outcomes and compare them to the real outcome to adjust
their electrical potential.

Until we begin developing systems which track things like this, with better
distribution of computation and intelligent synchronization of state, we will
be very far off from "consciousness" in a form that is intelligible and
tangible to the one experiencing it.

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kuwze
Funny I thought they would go the way of NIMH and invest in rats[0].

[0]: [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-
in-a...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a-dish-
fly-fighter-plane/)

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rubyfan
A million dollars doesn’t seem like the right payout for something like that.
I’m not an expert in the field but my guess is this is a small team of people
dedicated for a while and need technology to support it. Seems like $10M would
be a better target.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
it starts with a million, then another one - that makes two millions already!
then it goes on until there is an AI winter.

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pvaldes
Robots randomly falling in some aspects of their work?.

Thousands of neurons are dying constantly each day, even in healthy animals.
Would be like having a hard disk with thousands of new badblocks each day.

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i_for_one
How to nuked by terrified geopolitical rivals: Build insectoid killbots and
parade them across the global stage.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks_in_the_Cold_War#The_deve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks_in_the_Cold_War#The_development_of_antitank_weapons_and_countermeasures)

~~~
red_flags
I’m sure there’s simulations for the reality of getting nuked one way or
another by someone somehow.

The one thing that seems to catch heat the fastest is nuclear proxy states.
China and Russia don’t have to worry about retaliation if Iran and North Korea
are the suicidal nuclear combatants.

But nuking populated civilian cities is largely a game of bluffing your
opponent. Nuclear assault on targets without direct military value is a tactic
of absolutely last resort, at or near the point of total invasion, overrun and
occupation.

Occupation, for the victor, is no fun anymore. So why do it yourself. Just
encircle the conquered cities with gigantic robotic fire ants and cybernetic
killer bees, and let nature take its course.

