Does AI dream of electric sheep?
Key Takeaways
Birds doit; beesdo it; perhaps even fleasdo it.
Now, scientists believe that artificial intelligence may also need to sleep and maybe dream.
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Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory are trying to understand computer systems that work like neurons inside human brains.
They found that artificial intelligence may have to sleep to function correctly, according to arecent reportinScientific American.
It was as though we were giving the neural networks the equivalent of a good, long nap."
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The networks were instructed to classify objects without having any examples to compare them.
The AI networks began “spontaneously generating images that were analogous to hallucinations,” Kenyon said.
Once the networks were allowed the electronic equivalent of sleep, the hallucinations stopped.
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Sleep, or ‘Sleep’?
“Instead, it needs to cycle between chaos and calm,” he said in an email interview.
Previous research has found that, like humans, neural networks perform better when allowed to sleep.
The machines were programmed with the computer equivalent of rapid-eye-movement sleep and slow-wave sleep.
“This is how humans work,” he added.
“We are presented with problems or challenges, we overcome them, and we learn.
A dream state may be the ‘key’ to achieving this for AI.”
“The answer we give to all of these is that it may be possible,” he said.
A team of Google engineers announced in 2015 that a neural data pipe could “dream” up objects.
They used Googles image recognition software, which uses neural networks to simulate the human brain.
The engineers ran an experiment to see what images the networks “dream.”
The Google team created the “dreams” by feeding a picture into the internet.
Theresults of the experiment were bizarre, and some might even call them artistic.
Thaler argues that AI will need to sleep and dream more as the field progresses.
“One cannot have capable AI without creativity,” he said.
More ominously, Thaler said that AI also eventually could suffer from mental illnesses.
)," he added.
AI on Drugs?
Sleep might not even be necessary for AI to alter its consciousness.
According to arecent articlepublished in the journalNeuroscience of Consciousness, drugs might do just as well.
AI can trip, it seems.
The networks usually-photorealistic outputs became distorted blurs, similar to how people have described their DMT trips.
One cannot have capable AI without creativity.
The field of artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating.
The dreams of machines could be enlightening or frightening.
