Holy what?
The computer is known as DISCERN and it’s intended to simulate the sort of neural networks that occur in the brain and, importantly, what happens when you distort those networks—in this case via an excessive release of dopamine. Researchers at the University of Texas have released a study showing that what happens is something called hyperlearning, or when a brain loses the ability to forget.
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It’s pretty fascinating. What’s suggested is that dopamine, a neurotransmitter related to a variety of mental illness, acts as a sort of regulator that helps the brain decide what’s important, or salient. “When there’s too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience,” says researcher Uli Grasemann at the UT website. “And the brain ends up learning from things that it shouldn’t be learning from.”
The brain gets a ton of input constantly, and a great deal of it is unwanted or irrelevant. What I remember of the last hour is not the sum total of what I experienced in the last hour but, instead, what my brain has constructed for me, with the help of dopamine. Now imagine if you lost the ability to sort through it all, and just had a big rush of input. You still couldn’t process all of it, but your ability to select the correct things to process would be busted. Thus, schizophrenia.
“It’s an important mechanism to be able to ignore things,” says Grasemann. “What we found is that if you crank up the learning rate in DISCERN high enough, it produces language abnormalities that suggest schizophrenia.”
In the end, with hyperlearning in place, DISCERN lost it, putting itself in the center of “fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall.” Like, it claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.
Neuroskeptic, however, points out that by using a “connectionist” approach to language DISCERN is by no means a perfect simulation:
Connectionist models are a bit like brains, in other words. A bit. They’re several orders of magnitude simpler than a real brain, in several different respects. Still, they can “learn” to do some quite complicated things. You can train them to recognise faces and stuff, which is not trivial.
Anyway, DISCERN is a connectionist model of language, but it’s not necessary a model of how the human brain actually learns language. Because we just have no idea how the human brain does that. We don’t even know if our brain acts as a connectionist network at all, above the cellular level. Some cognitive scientists think it is, but others think that those guys are talking out of an orifice connected to their mouth, but not their mouth. Not in so many words you understand.
But still. . . Allow me to direct you into the rabbit hole that is the discussion of human rights for artificial intelligence.
Connected:
What Some of Our Thoughtful Human Friends Think About Watson
Daisy, Daisy: Kubrick’s HAL 9000 Took Singing Lessons From IBM’s 7094 Computer
Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
