Things aren’t going too well for poor old Homo sapiens. Like a bacterial colony in a petri dish, we are starting to use up our resources fast, and pathological symptoms are appearing. When a species runs up against its ecological limits, it is quickly replaced by better adapted competitors. Two stories from Nature Briefings indicate how things might go. And that we have a way out of this if we are prepared to adapt.
Report Charts machines meteoric rise Better at maths. Better at pattern recognition. Better at reading. Remember that bright kid in the class? Next time you heard of him was twenty years later and he was Chief Executive Officer of a blue chip corporation. Well, that’s the way it is with AI now. .
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can now nearly match — and sometimes exceed — human performance in tasks such as reading comprehension, image classification and mathematics. “The pace of gain has been startlingly rapid,” says social scientist Nestor Maslej, editor-in-chief of the annual AI Index. The report calls for new benchmarks to assess algorithms’ capabilities and highlights the need for a consensus on what ethical AI models would look like.Nature | 6 min read
Reference: 2024 AI Index report
Milestone Map of Brain Connectivity Yet there may be a chance of survival. First read this
Researchers have mapped the tens of thousands of cells and connections between them in one cubic millimetre of the mouse brain. The project, which took US$100 million and years of effort by more than 100 scientists, is a milestone of ‘connectomics’, which aims to chart the circuits that coordinate the organ’s many functions. Identifying the brain’s architectural principles could one day guide the development of artificial neural networks. Teams are now working on mapping larger areas, although a whole-brain reconstruction “may be a ‘Mars shot’ — it’s really much harder than going to the Moon”, says connectomics pioneer Jeff Lichtman. Nature | 12 min read
The point is that AI and mammal brains have one thing in common. Both depend on networks and the system control architecture that runs them. In theory it should be possible to create beings which fuse AI with biological neurons. This has already begun, in a small way, with things like brain implants and limb attachments which can interface with the nervous system. It is possible to imagine biocyber hybrids with advanced intellectual and physical capacities which are ready for the challenges of the future. It looks as if Homo sapiens itself may no longer be up to it. But the genus Homo will survive, albeit in modified form. Which has happened successfully before. We’ll leave you with some thoughts from the old British Rocker David Bowie, who memorably observed
The earth is a bitch, we’ve finished our news/Homo sapiens have outgrown their use
Which is the exact text of this blog. He just said it better.
#davis bowie #AI #neural networks #future #pollution #global warming # genetic engineering
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