In 1974 the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, cited earlier in this book, coined the phrase "sociogenic brain damage." Technologies since available to us confirm that stressed environments, including penury, do interfere with brain development. More recently, one scientist has called poverty a "neurotoxin." Brain scans of children and young people from deprived backgrounds have shown reduced surface area of the cerebral cortex, as well as smaller hippocampi and amygdalae-the subcortical regions involved in memory formation and emotional processing. The brain's serotonin system in adolescents has been seen to be impaired by the stresses of poverty, increasing the risk for emotional turbulence.
Alphaber'in bir başka birimi olan Google Brain'in araştırmacıları, kendi yapay zekâlarını üretebilecek bir yapay zekâ oluşturduklarını açıkladılar. AutoML olarak adlandırılan sistem, "pekiştirici öğrenme" adı verilen bir teknik kullanarak yapay öğrenme modellerinin tasarımını otomatikleştirdi. AutoML, dar ve belirli görevler için "çocuk" yapay zeka ağları yaratmak üzere bir "ebeveyn" olarak çalışıyordu. AutoML kendisinden istenmeden NASNet adında bir çocuk yarattı ve ona videolarda insanlar, arabalar, trafik ışıkları, cüzdanlar vs. gibi nesneleri tanımayı öğretti.
Stres, ego, şüphe veya özgüven eksikliği gibi en parlak bilgisayar bilimcilerinde bile bulunan özellikleri taşımayan NASNet, görüntüleri %82,7 oranında doğru tahmin etti. Bu; çocuk sistemin, daha önce ebeveynini yaratan insanlar dâhil, insan kodlayıcılarından daha iyi performans gösterdiği anlamına geliyordu.
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Rob Lustig calls the United States "the drug capital of the world," and he isn't talking about cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine, nor even mass-marketed opioids like OxyContin. He is referring to sugar, a substance that, in 2013, the chief health officer of the Netherlands declared to be "addictive and the most dangerous drug of all times." "Addictive" is not too strong a term. A Harvard Medical School study found that people ingesting foods with a high glycemic index -meaning, in practice, junk foods that rapidly elevate blood sugar levels- got hungrier faster. On fMRI scans, they showed activation of the same brain regions stimulated by drugs such as cocaine or heroin. Never missing a profitable beat, multinational corporations vigorously market sugar-laden resignet concoctions to children, and prey on people who, owing to trauma, penury, and grinding oppression, are especially vulnerable to addictive substances.
... in Michael Moss's 2013 work of investigative journalism on the food industry, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, one of the most widely read books of the year. He, too, documented a deliberate corporate conspiracy to hook people on addictive junk foods, with no regard for health consequences. Painstaking work combining the expertise of scientists and marketing wizards was undertaken to find the "bliss spot," that perfect blend of sugar, salt, and fat that would most excite the brain's pleasure centers.
Neuroscience, originally meant to unlock the mysteries of consciousness and the brain, has become iou another handmaiden of the profit motive. There is actually a field called -and I'm not making this up- neuromarketing. "Their aim is to market happiness in a bottle," Lustig added. Or in a hamburger, or in a new smartphone or one of its many apps. In short, these corporations are acting as unscrupulous pushers in the open-air, perfectly legal market of mass addiction.
Broadly speaking, the human brain is a collection of software hacks compiled into a single, somehow-functional unit. Each “feature” was added as a random mutation that solved some specific problem to increase our odds of survival. In short, the human brain is a mess.
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