Synchron Readies Large-Scale Brain Implant Trial

[...]
Synchron's device is delivered to the brain via the large vein that sits next to the motor cortex in the brain instead of being surgically implanted into the brain cortex like Neuralink's.
[...]
In 2020, Synchron reported that patients, opens new tab in its Australian study could use its first-generation device to type an average of 16 characters per minute. That's better than non-invasive devices that sit atop the head and record the electrical activity of the brain, which have helped people type up to eight characters per minute
[...]
Reuters notes that Synchron's investors include billionaires Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. It's competing with Elon Musk's Neuralink brain implant startup and claims it's farther along in the process of testing its device.

Vernor Vinge, Father of the Tech Singularity, Has Died At Age 79

Vinge, Vernor. "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era", in Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, G. A. Landis, ed., NASA Publication CP-10129, pp. 11–22, 1993.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140121032922/http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Singularity/sing.html

https://archive.org/download/pdfy-MZn00mx0Y3Kv2X9O/Vernor%20Vinge%20The%20coming%20technological%20singularity.pdf

People talk a lot about AGI/ASI these days, artificial general intelligence and artificial super intelligence, the strong AI, with different definitions and time estimations when we will reach such a level, but, the actual point in TS takeoff is the feedback loop, when the system starts to feed its own development in an feedback loop and exceeds human understanding. As mentioned, we already have a human <-> computer feedback loop, better computers help us humans to build better computers, but I am still waiting/observing for the direct link, AI builds better AI, computers build better computers, the AI autopoiesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis

The first human sacrifice to the AI overlords? Something to ponder on....

Man ends his life after an AI chatbot 'encouraged' him to sacrifice himself to stop climate change

Haha, GPT's first Sicak Kava - Hot Skull moment? A stage one jabberer? :)

ChatGPT Goes Temporarily 'Insane' With Unexpected Outputs, Spooking Users

...
reports of the AI assistant "having a stroke," "going insane," "rambling," and "losing it."
...
"It gave me the exact same feeling -- like watching someone slowly lose their mind either from psychosis or dementia,"
...
Some users even began questioning their own sanity. "What happened here?

Neuralink's First Human Patient Able To Control Mouse Through Thinking, Musk Says

The first human patient implanted with a brain-chip from Neuralink appears to have fully recovered and is able to control a computer mouse using their thoughts, the startup's founder Elon Musk said late on Monday. From a report: "Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of. Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking," Musk said in a Spaces event on social media platform X. Musk said Neuralink was now trying to get as many mouse button clicks as possible from the patient. The firm successfully implanted a chip on its first human patient last month, after receiving approval for human trial recruitment in September.

Scientists Have 3D Bioprinted Functioning Human Brain Tissue

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As New Atlas explains, researchers placed neurons grown from pluripotent stem cells (those capable of becoming multiple different cell types) within a new
bio-ink gel made with fibrinogen and thrombin, biomaterials involved in blood clotting. Adding other hydrogels then helped loosen the bio-ink to solve
for the 3 encountered during previous 3D-printed tissue experiments.
....
The new structures could interact thanks to producing neurotransmitters, and even created support cell networks within the 3D-printed tissue.
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Researchers believe their technique isn't limited to creating just those two types of cultures, but hypothetically "pretty much any type of neurons [sic] at any time,"

In systems-theory there are the concepts of autopoiesis and allopoiesis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allopoiesis

In context of the Technological Singularity the question is, will the AI, or the AIs, reach autopoiesis?

Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, died on Friday, March 24, 2023:

"Gordon Moore, Intel Co-Founder, Dies at 94"
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/gordon-moore-obituary.html

...and chip-makers are struggling to keep Moore's Law alive?

"...Moore's Law is alive and well today and the overall trend continues, though it remains to be seen whether it can be sustained in the longer term..."
https://www.futuretimeline.net/data-trends/moores-law.htm

But, IMHO, we are already kind of cheating in regard of transistor-count on a chip. AMD uses up to 12 chiplets, Intel 4 slices, and Apple 2 slices in their CPUs, and now the chiplet design enters also the GPU domain, with up to 1KW power usage for super-computer chips.

We have now 5nm, 3nm in pipe, and 2nm and 1+nm upcoming fab process, ofc, meanwhile marketing numbers, but should reflect transistor density/efficiency of the fab process.

We might have upcoming X-ray lithography and new materials like graphene in pipe. What else?

What about:

- Memristors?
- Photonics?
- Quantum Computers?
- Wetware (artificial biological brains)?
- MPU - memory processing unit?
- Superconductor (at room temperature)?

I still wait to see Memristor based NVRAM and neuromorphic chip designs....but maybe people are now into Wetware for large language models, biological brains run way more energy efficient they say...

and, it seems kind of funny to me, at first we used GPUs for things like Bitcoin mining, now everybody tries to get hands on these for generative AIs. There is currently so much money flowing into this domain, that progress for the next couple of years seems assured -> Moore's Second Law.

We have CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, DSPs, ASICs and FPGAs, and extended from scalar to vector to matrix and spatial computing.

We have the Turing-Machine, the Quantum-Turing-Machine, what about the Hyper-Turing-Machine?

We used at first electro-mechanical relays, then tubes, then transistors, then ICs, then microchips to build binary computers. I myself predicted that with reaching the 8 billions human mark (~2023), we will see a new, groundbreaking, technology passing through, still waiting for the next step in this line.

Machines, the AI, talking twaddle and suffering from hallucinations? A mirror of our society. A machine mind with a rudimentary body but disconnected from its soul? A mirror of our society. Machine minds used to generate fake-money, fake-speech and fake-porn? A mirror of our society.