Editor's Blog
A January 22 item on the Fast Company site makes it sound like a recent development — something called the NOMFET: Nanoparticle Organic Memory Field-Effect Transistor — provides a big push toward brain simulation and strong AI. And just when you were settling in for another three or maybe five or ten decades of human dominance.
"Talk of androids, advanced computer-based brain simulations and war robots is very exiting, but the development of artificial intelligence has been slightly stumped by a lack of transistors that work like our brains do. Until now."
"Now, thanks to scientists in France, we have the NOMFET–the nanoparticle organic memory field-effect transistor…"
"…the NOMFET behaves in a similar way to the manner of an organic synapse as it transmits a signal between neurons — it can modify its reaction to incoming signals based on events that happened before, or on the nature of the signal it’s dealing with at that moment. As a result it will allow for simplified chip-based simulations of a brain-type system, with far fewer semiconductor components than have been needed previously."
Fast Company: Robocalypse Alert: New Transistor Mimics Synapse Functions
Physorg: (the scientific version)
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8 Comments
Interesting, but it remains to be seen if an AI would spontaneously emerge from a computer made using this.
What it does speak for is a massive possible advance in BCI. An interface which uses the same sort of communications structure that the brain does might make creating mind computer links significantly simpler. It could also be quite useful for cybernetic limbs.
Between this, and the recent advances in using graphene in current chip architectures which could lead to terahertz computing, we may indeed be about to see a massive leap in robotics technology.
@Valkyrie – Spontaneously? I don’t think so. This can help engineering more suitable AI hardware, but we still have work to do with the software.
It may be used to make much faster and better BCI – EPOC on steroids. And, memory implants. Suppose in 20 years I get a memory implant able to interface naturally with my bio brain. If memory is stored in a distributed fashion (holographically), my memories will “migrate” into the implant. And so my identity, _I_, will migrate into the implant.
*giggle* No I certainly don’t expect spontaneous AI emergence. Never have, despite the fact that so many sci-fi stories start with a spontaneous emergence. But it was an inevitable question that would have been asked. “Will this lead to a human AI since it’s duplicating human nerve structure?”
I tend to share the exact same view as you Giulio. This will likely speed development of BCI. Hopefully enormously, acting as a translator between Neurons and Von Neumann style computers.
Your consciousness will not, however. You will still be you, a flesh and blood organism, while the information in your brain can be duplicated and live on. You can’t escape mortality save by some preservation of the brain, the constant activity of which seats the actual experienced awareness.
Isn’t this just another implementation of HP’s memristor?
Take a look at the wikipedia page on the ‘AI effect.’ A technology like this is simply a different computing model. It is the one we use, that of pattern recognition, rather than explicit logic, as is done by current computing models, but it is not special in that by some event an entity that we would call “human” will magically emerge from the woodwork. Because we will understand how it works, we will be able to rationalize an asserted absence of “genuine” intelligence in order to keep ourselves at the top. There is no reason to believe that current machine learning does not constitute intelligence, however narrow.
Fundamentally, it seems so, though the implementation appears different.
It is more likely the Von Neumann architecture will be superseded by the wetware model as described in relation to memristors: it is a more adaptive and instant method of computation, because the computation and memory are simultaneous. That is the bottleneck currently faced by the conventional architecture.