If a catastrophic failure occurs we will have to return to first principles and re-derive the solutions. Not so bad, probably enlivening even to get to spin up the mind again after a break.
We found 500 zero-days in ten year old widely used open-source projects. Was that not a demonstration of the catastrophic failure of human debugging capability?
yep. Tried to overthrow the government once already, with no consequence, so there's no reason not to try it again. This time he's way more entrenched/powerful. He & VP have said multiple times they want to remove all govt workers who aren't "their people", which would make a 1-Party state, aka authoritarian regime. Culmination of Project 2025 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025#Allegations_of_au...).
We're going to lose Iran war, which will put more pressure on "national security" & economy. That'll dovetail into 2028 elections. So he'll start a new war, claim there are extremists at home, start martial law, refuse to leave office. When that happens, same things that happen in every authoritarian regime will start. He's said publicly he wants to jail his enemies and curtail rights like free speech and journalism. It'll be extended into more fearmongering about minority groups to galvanize the base. Those big detention camps will get a lot bigger. Economy will be in the shitter, but that's fine, just blame it on "enemies", talk about "empire", and start a world war. Draft comes back, suddenly you have a huge infantry, lots of factory workers, staffed largely by political enemies.
If AI takes all the jobs and consolidation of wealth continues it’s not an unlikely outcome. No income no spending = dead economy, poverty and starvation.
What are do people do when their government and capitalism fails them?
It doesn't have to take all the jobs. If it can take most of the fake jobs we've invented over the years, it will be massively destructive to our way of life. It seems to already have that level of capability.
Funny that you assume education will lead to some sort of egalitarian society. What do you think the point of modern education is? We all take the course in evolution and natural selection, whether we want to or not. We all study history. We all fraternize and learn the little political games or we drop out. Some of us recieve a degree in hard knocks. Why shouldn't the educated be more cutthroat than the rest of us?
If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
That said, this article doesn't get to the point in the free section. How are they collecting the information? Slicing is inherently destructive. Someone's got to manufacture an entirely novel imaging modality. Perhaps they could scan millimeters ahead of the slice at a resolution high enough to image receptors. Not possible currently.
Take a gander at the OpenWorm project. It's a great example of how simple neuronal activity is (given details like the connections, number of receptors, and transmitter infrastructure). SOTA models of neuronal activity are simple enough for problem sets in undergraduate biomedical engineering programs.
Sure, to your point, we don't know. But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
My main point is that the scale of the human brain is well beyond the capabilities of modern imaging modalities, and it will likely remain so indefinitely. Fascicles we can image, individual axons we cannot. I guess, theoretically, we'll eventually be able to (but it's not relevant to us or any of our remote descendants).
> But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.
Nematode worms have an oxytocin analogue called nematocin that is known to influence learning and social behaviors like mating. As far as I can find, the project doesn't account for this, or only minimally, but aims to in the future.
It's not surprising that immediate short-term behaviors like movement depend mostly on the faster signaling of the connectome. But since we know of other mechanisms that most definitely influence the connectome's behavior, and we know we don't account for those at the moment, it is not accurate to say that the connectome is "all the information you need".
I agree that mapping the connectome of the human brain is impractical to the point of impossibility. But even if we could, the resulting "circuit diagram" would not capture all the details needed to fully replicate human cognition. Aspects of it, sure. Maybe even enough to make it do useful tasks for EvilCorp LLC while being prodded with virtual sticks and carrots. But it would be incomplete.
I saw a putative 3D animation of a fly whose brain had been digitized and then run in a simulation. It buzzed around, sipped food it had found on the ground, even rubbed its forelegs together as flies do. A true Dixie Flyline. We live in strange times...
There's research on the translation process where cells are basically flash-frozen (to avoid water crystals), then imaged with cryoelectronmicroscopy / AFM etc. where they image the translation process (RNA to protein) in order to get snapshots and get a better understanding of how the folding proceeds and is aided.
If we can image sub-cellular features, what makes you believe we can't trace all the axons, dendrites and the synapses?
It seems more like a question of how to do it cost effectively at scale, not so much a question of "can we or not?".
> If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).
This is exactly what I’m doubting, how can you be so sure?
Yeah but it wasn’t though. I found your answer unconvincing. I suppose “we don’t know” is an answer but that is nothing like “we have all the information we need”
Am I right in thinking that even if you had all of the connections and weights mapped out for a brain, the specifics of synaptic plasticity are still pretty poorly understood?
What is the state of the art in regards to how neurons learn over time? Do existing neuron models account for that? Being trapped, unable to learn anything, sounds terrible.
It is my understanding that for the animals where we have a simulation of the full connectome the behavior you see approximates the real behavior reasonably well, so maybe the jury is still out as to whether it is sufficient or not.
How about that few want one artist’s particular style reproduced, instead they want what they are vaguely seeing in their head produced from a cacophony of styles
It’s not meaningless; it’s a way for them to immediately prove that the person speaking has been intimidated enough by them to acquiesce to this absurdity. If they don’t, they can be punished just for refusing. If they do, they’re already back on their heels proving their willingness to cave on anything else.
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