Australian researchers at the International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems (ICNS) at Western Sydney University have announced they are building what they are calling Deep South (based on IBM’s Deep Blue). This will be the world’s largest neuromorphic supercomputer, with 228 trillion synaptic operations per second. This won’t be the fastest supercomputer in the world, which is currently reaching the exascale with quintillions of operations per second. So then what’s the big deal? It probably has something to do with the “neuromorphic” part.

The basic definition of a neuromorphic computer is one based on or inspired by the design of biological systems – something more closely resembling neurons and synapses. Conventional computers have central processing units and separate memory storage. But they seem to get the job done. Neuromorphic computers have components that function more like neurons and synapses which are both memory and processing at the same time. Also, the process is massively parallel and distributed. But if this is not necessarily faster than conventional computers, why bother?

There are two reasons, but the first is efficiency. The human brain is a powerful computer, and yet it operates only 20 watts of power. That is incredibly more energy efficient than any computer, and researchers believe this is because of the architecture. Right now specific computer applications use the energy of small countries. Crypto uses 127 terawatt hours per year, more than Norway. Data centers use 340 TWh. A Chat GPT query uses 15 times the energy as a normal Google query, and again is already getting to small-country levels of energy use. The AI revolution, whatever else you may think about it, is energy hungry.

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Scientists have developed virtual reality goggles for mice. Why would they do this? For research. The fact that it’s also adorable is just a side effect.

One type of neuroscience research is to expose mice in a laboratory setting to specific tasks or stimuli while recording their brain activity. You can have an implant, for example, measure brain activity while it runs a maze. However, having the mouse run around an environment puts limits on the kind of real time brain scanning you can do. So researchers have been using VR (virtual reality) for about 15 years to simulate an environment while keeping the mouse in a more controlled setting, allowing for better brain imaging.

However, this setup is also limiting. The VR is really just surrounding wrap-around screens. But it is technically challenging to have overhead screens, because that is where the scanning equipment is, and there are still visual clues that the mouse is in a lab, not the virtual environment. So this is an imperfect setup. k

The solution was to build tiny VR goggles for mice. The mouse does not wear the goggles like a human wears a VR headset. They can’t get them that small yet. Rather, the goggles are mounted, and the mouse is essentially placed inside the goggle while standing on a treadmill. The mouse can therefore run around while remaining stationary on the treadmill, and keep his head in the mounted VR goggles. This has several advantages over existing setups.

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Not a crow.

One of the core tenets of scientific skepticism is what I call neuropsychological humility – the recognition that while the human brain is a powerful information processing machine, it also has many frailties. One of those frailties is perception – we do not perceive the world in a neutral or objective way. Our perception of the world is constructed from multiple sensory streams processed together and filtered through internal systems that include our memories, expectations, biases, assumptions and (critically) attention. In many ways, we see what we know, what we are looking for, and what we expect to see. Perhaps the most internet-famous example of this is the invisible gorilla, a dramatic example of inattentional blindness.

Far more subtle is what might be called cultural blindness – we can perceive differences that we already know exist or with which we are very familiar, but otherwise may miss differences as a background blur. On my personal intellectual journey, one dramatic example I often refer to is my perception before and after becoming a birder. For most of my life birds were something in the background I paid little attention to. My internal birding map consisted of a few local species and broad groups. I could recognize cardinals, blue jays, crows, pigeons, and mourning doves. Any raptor was a “hawk”. There were ducks and geese, and then there was – everything else. I would probably call any small bird a sparrow, if I thought to call it anything at all. I knew of other birds from nature shows, but they were not part of my world.

The birding learning curve was very steep, and completely changed my perception. What I called “crows” consisted not only of crows but ravens and at least two types of grackle. I can identify the field markings of several hawks and two vultures. I can tell the subtle differences between a downy and hairy woodpecker. At first I had difficulty telling a chickadee from a nuthatch, now the difference is obvious. I can even tell some sparrow species apart. My internal birding map is vastly different, and that affects how I perceive the world.

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Remember the 1980 film, The Formula? Probably not, because it was a mediocre film that did not age well. The basic plot is that Nazi chemists during WWII developed a formula for synthetic gasoline. A detective investigating a murder gets embroiled in a conspiracy to cover up the existence of this formula, and he struggles to expose it to the world, but is ultimately foiled by the many layers of this conspiracy. At the heart of the conspiracy is the fossil fuel industry, who wants to protect their golden goose. I remember thinking at the time that this was dumb, and now I appreciate how dumb it is on a much deeper level.

There is a scientific and critical thinking layer to the superficial thoughtlessness of this plot. From a critical thinking perspective, a conspiracy to suppress such a formula makes no sense. Such a formula (if we buy the premise of such a thing, which I don’t, as you will see) would be incredibly valuable to anyone who controls it. An oil company could (again, given the film’s premise) in a single stroke dominate the world’s energy production and crush the competition. But perhaps more critically, it makes no sense that such a formula would have been discovered almost 40 years prior to the timeframe of the film and yet was never reproduced. Have you every noticed that for any significant invention there are often a host of people claiming they really invented it. That’s because they likely did, or at least contributed to the invention. When our science and technology are at a point where a breakthrough is possible, it is likely that many people/labs/companies/nations will converge on the discovery at roughly the same time.

However, popular culture is stuck in the “lone genius” narrative, thinking of scientific breakthroughs as the unique product of a singular genius. This is just not how science typically works. Increasingly, it is a tangled web of collaboration with many players each contributing incrementally to an overall progress. Major inventions are “ripe”, and they have a paper trail. The notion that Nazi chemists were decades ahead of the rest of the world in such an immense technology is not plausible.

But even more fatal to the plot of this film is the premise of the title – that the limiting factor in the ability to fuel the world with synthetic gasoline is knowing the proper formula. Having a chemical formula for synthesizing hydrocarbons is not the tricky part. Whenever dealing with any energy technology, I find it extremely useful to ask the basic question – where is the energy coming from? If you don’t have a very thorough answer to this question, be skeptical.

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One of the greatest mysteries of modern science is how to unite the two overarching theories of physics – quantum mechanics and general relativity. If physicists could somehow unite these two theories, which currently do not play well together, then we might get to a deeper “one theory to rule them all.”

Quantum mechanics essentially says that we do not live in a classical universe. Classical physics as it operates on the macroscopic scale is just the surface level, the end result of a quantum universe at the near atomic and smaller scale. At the quantum scale (not to be confused with the Quantum Realm fantasy of Marvel – don’t get me started), reality is quantized and probabilistic. Things that seem like magic on the macro scale are reality at the quantum scale, like wave particle duality and entanglement.

General relativity, rather, deals with the super big scale, spacetime itself. Einstein postulated that gravity is the result of spacetime being curved. Freely moving objects actually always travel in a straight line, but through curved space. Mass curves space, which is how mass creates gravity. This is, as least, a reasonable lay person’s understanding of these concepts.

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One of my favorite recent video games is Subnautica, in which you have to survive almost entirely under a vast alien ocean. You have the advantage of advanced technology, but even then you are under constant threat of running out of oxygen, or having your habitat implode because it was not sufficiently reinforced. You are mostly working in brief increments and shallow depths.

That is similar to reality. Underwater is an extremely challenging environment, and human researchers do most of their work in brief increments and shallow depths. It says something that we have a continuous human presence in space, but not underwater. Some of the challenges are similar. You need a protected environment that is largely self-sufficient, at least for long periods of time. You need to provide heat and oxygen, and deal with changes in pressure. Of course, in space the problem is the lack of pressure outside the space station, while under water the challenge is increased pressure. This is actually far more of a challenge underwater, as the deeper you go the pressure difference from inside to out can be far greater than in space. Underwater you also have to deal with the corrosive effects of salt water.

A company, Deep, plans to have long term continuous human habitation under the ocean for the first time, with their Sentinel habitat. This will allow up to six people to live at 200 meters under the ocean for up to 28 days at a time. They plan on deploying the crew in November 2026. The Sentinel will be 400 cubic meters in size, with modules 6.2 meters in diameter – that is about the same diameter as a 777 fuselage. Imagine living in a space the size of a large jet for 28 days. By all accounts the space will be nice, but that is still cramped an isolating.

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Let’s dive head first into one of the internet’s most contentious questions – do we have true free will? This comes up not infrequently whenever I write here about neuroscience, most recently when I wrote about hunger circuitry, because the notion of the brain as a physical machine tends to challenge our illusion of complete free will. Debates tend to become heated, because it is truly challenging to wrap our meat brains around such an abstract question.

I always find the discussion to be enlightening, however. In the most recent discussion I detect that some commenters are using the term “free will” differently than others. Precisely (operationally) defining terms is always critical in such discussions, so I wanted to break down what I feel are the three definitions or levels of free will that we are dealing with. It seems to me that there is a superficial level, a neurological level, and a metaphysical level to free will. Language fails us here because we have only one term to refer to these very different things (at least colloquially – philosophers probably have lots of highly precise technical terms).

At the most superficial level we do make decisions, and some people consider this free will. To be clear, I am not aware of any serious thinker or philosopher who holds that we do not make decisions. There is a deeper discussion about the mechanisms of those decisions, but we do make them, we are consciously aware of them, and we can act on them. From this perspective, people are agents, and are accountable to the choices they make.

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Methane is the forgotten greenhouse gas (sort of). Often, when discussing how best to reduce anthropogenic climate change, we talk about decarbonizing our electrical and transport sectors, and carbon removal. But methane is also a greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming, and we cannot afford to ignore it. As I discussed recently, methane traps more heat than CO2 but survives for a shorter amount of time in the atmosphere (about 12 years vs hundreds for CO2). Over 20 years it is 80 times worse than CO2, over 100 years it is 28 times worse.

The world releases 580 million tons of methane each year, compared to 37 billion tons for CO2 (about two orders of magnitude more). That means over a 20 year timespan, methane has the equivalent greenhouse gas effect as 46 billion tons of CO2 (570 million x 80). In the short term methane is driving global warming a little more than CO2. Perhaps this is an opportunity. CO2 release is essentially the unavoidable consequence of burning fossil fuel. We can mitigate it with carbon capture, but this so far is minimally effective. I only real option is to reduce and then stop the burning of fossil fuel. We are in a race to do this, but it will take decades because the world is dependent on fossil fuel as an energy source.

Methane leaking into the atmosphere, however, is not a completely unavoidable consequence of industry. The largest source of methane emissions is natural, from wetlands (195 million tons). Next is agriculture (142 million) followed closely by the energy sector (135 million).  Waste is another 73 million tons, followed by another 45 million from everything else (mostly natural). How can we mitigate this?

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In my second book (shameless plug alert) – The Skeptics’ Guide to the Future – my coauthors and I try to imagine both the utopian and dystopian versions of the future, brought about by technology, either individually or collectively. This topic has come up multiple times recently on this blog when discussing technology and trust in science and scientists, so I thought it deserved its own discussion.

The overarching point is that science and technology should not be thought of as pure objective good, but rather they are tools, and tools can be used for good or evil. I admit I am a science enthusiast and a technophile, also a bit of an optimist, so when I hear about a new discovery or technology my first thoughts go to all the ways that it might make life better, or at least cooler. I have to remember to consider all the ways in which the technology can also be abused or exploited, which is why we explicitly did this in our futurism book.

So far, on the balance I think science and technology has been an incredible plus to humanity. For most of human existence life was “short, nasty, and brutish.” Science has given us a greater perspective on ourselves and the universe, freeing us from ignorance and superstition. And technology has given us the power to extend our lives, improve our health, and control our environment. It enables us to peer deep into the universe, and see for the first time a microscopic world that was always there but we had no idea existed. It enables us to travel beyond the confines of our planet, and eventually (if we survive) will enable us to be a multi-world, and even multi-system, species.

I do think we have lost touch with how bad life was prior to modern technology. Our period movies, for example, are highly romanticized. A brutally accurate portrayal of life prior to the industrial revolution would show people with horrible dentition ravaged by diseases and living mostly in drudgery. Most people never saw the world beyond their small village.  We get a hint of this sometimes, but never the reality.

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There are several technologies which seem likely to be transformative in the coming decades. Genetic bioengineering gives us the ability to control the basic machinery of life, including ourselves. Artificial intelligence is a suite of active, learning, information tools. Robotics continues its steady advance, and is increasingly reaching into the micro-scale. The world is becoming more and more digital, based upon information, and our ability to translate that information into physical reality is also increasing.

Finally, we are increasingly able to interface ourselves with this digital technology, through brain machine interfaces, and hybrid biological technology. This is the piece I want to discuss today, because of a recent paper detailing a hybrid biopolymer transistor. This is one of the goals of computer technology going forward – to make biological, or at least biocompatible, computers. The more biocompatible our digital technology, the better we will be able to interface that technology with biology, especially the human brain.

This begins with the transistor, the centerpiece of modern computing technology. A transistor is basically a switch that has two states, which can be used to store binary information (1s and 0s). If the switch in on, current flows through the semiconductor, and that indicates a 1, if it is off, current does not flow, indicating a zero. The switch is also controlled by a gate separated by an insulator. These switches can turn on and off 100 billion times a second. Circuits of these switches are designed to process information – to do the operations that form the basis of computing. (This is an oversimplification, but this is the basic idea.)\

This new hybrid transistor uses silk proteins as the insulator around the gates of the transistor. The innovation is the ability to control these proteins at the nano-scale necessary to make a modern transistor. Using silk proteins rather than an inorganic substance allows the transistor to react to its environment in a way that purely inorganic transistors cannot. For example, the ambient moisture will affect the insulating properties of these proteins, changing the operation of the gates.

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