There’s a video on YouTube where someone has managed to train a network of rat neurons to play doom, the way they did it seems reminiscent of how we train ML models
I am under the impression from the video that real neurons are a lot better at learning than simulated ones (and much less power demanding)
Could any ML problems, such as natural language generation be solved using neurons instead and would that be in any way practical?
Ethically at this point is this neuron array considered conscious in any way?
Cortical Labs certainly hope so: https://wired.me/science/this-startup-grows-brain-cells-on-ai-chips/
But outside of the context of computing on devices: yes, as others have noted, the neurons we’re trying to simulate in machine learning models aren’t much different than our own. So, just look at any person to see how well neurons are suited to language/etc. workloads (or not, depending how clever the people around you are 😂)
As to ethics, consciousness is an “emergent phenomenon”. It seems to arise, near as we can tell, from the interaction of many simple systems. No single cell or cluster thereof in a brain is conscious, but get them all working nearby one another and suddenly… 🎇