The Thought Emporium
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2020–2025
17:19 · 3.4M views · Dec 3, 2019
The Thought Emporium builds a homemade multi-electrode array, grows human neurons on it and attempts to take readings. It is the first part of a series aimed at connecting living neurons to a computer.
HN cites it as an impressive garage-science example of neuron-computer interfaces and hard-science DIY biology.
8 comments from Hacker News
Interesting is understatement, it's a channel which is one of the closer ones to hard science on the hard science - pop science spectrum and still having more than a million subscribers. Some outstanding videos IMHO: The channel owner applies himself a gene therapy to fix his lactose intolerance. [LINK] How exactly the Covid Tests work: [LINK] Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer this video Especially the Covid test video was eye opening against the conspiracy theorist propaganda during the pandemic because knowing how tests actually work on practical level makes you see through the claims effort free.
If you're interested in exploring direct neuron + computer integration, Justin Atkin from The Thought Emporium is attempting to grow neurons on an electrode array. Here are two episodes that cover his work: Growing Human Neurons Connected to a Computer - this video Connecting Neurons to a Computer: The New Plan - [LINK]
Seeing a dude grow human neurons directly connected to a computer chip to make a "human AI", all from his garage [0]. It showed me what is possible with science these days if you have enough dedication and know-how. Made me feel deeply excited and scared for the incoming future. [0] this video
Just yesterday [0] I also did an upper bound estimate on computing power of a human brain based on assumption that brains carry out irreversible computations. E.g. inputs of an AND gate can not be recovered from the gate output. This forces increase of entropy. This is known as Landauer's principle or Landauer's limit [1]. The Landauer's limit suggests that a brain consuming 20W at 36C can carry out no more than ~1e22 irreversible operations per second (20W / (309.2K * Boltzmann constant * ln(2))). That bounds brains at ~1e21 FLOP/s (~10 bits erased per FLOP). The best supercomputer right now does ~4e17 FLOP/s. That's log2(1e21 / 4e17) ~11 doublings of computing power until supercomputers will be faster than thermodynamic maximum of FLOPS power of brains. Assuming we keep up the doubling time below 3 years, we will have supercomputers faster than a human brain in up to 3 * 11 ~ 33 years. And at that rate we will need another log2(1000^3) ~ 30 doublings to reach humanity brains computational power, so up to another 90 years. Overall, I don't see a reason why not to use biological platform for general type computations. If we are able to grow muscle tissue in a lab on an industrial scale, then we should be able to learn how to grow neurons in a lab on an industrial scale. Apparently neurons are a lot more difficult to grow, but it's still perfectly doable [2]. The issue is that we don't know how to grow them so that they do useful computation. But I can easily imagine that AWS
> It's about at the level where you could make a good attempt to replicate it as a hobby in your (albeit well stocked) garage. Already being done: this video Doesn’t hurt to join forces with another ‘well stocked garage‘ featured earlier on HN: this video