“Do androids dream? Rick asked himself.”
Fans will recognize that line from the 1968 classic sci-fi novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick about Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who “retired” androids. If Dick were alive today, he might ponder whether neural networks giving artificial intelligence psychedelics hallucinate electric sheep after hearing about a new study by neuroscientists who gave deep neural networks, considered to be the brains of machine learning, a dose of AI that modeled psychedelic trips under DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) to better understand how the real drugs affect the human brain.
“(Deep neural networks) can help illustrate how psychedelics perturb perception and can be used to guide hypotheses on how sensory information is prevented from updating the brain’s model of the world.”