Machines That Emulate The Human Brain

prostoalex writes "Discover magazine provides an interesting insight into the future technologies that will emulate the human brain. While artificial intelligence supporters always considered direct emulation of brain functions too complex and preferred the top-down approach, some people are researching the ways human brain processes data. One of the interesting discoveries, mentioned in the article, is ability of the brain to re-architect the links as new information is added."

is it just me ...

[josephgrossberg]

or are the four facial expressions analyzed:

smirk, smirk, smirk, smirk

?

There's no ghost in the machine...

[CodeShark]

i.e., at least up to this point in time, there is no "self animating" force in any electronic entity that I am aware of.

Even if the sheer processing capability could be duplicated, at a similar scale, with similar power requirements, with today's technologies there is still no true intelligence in the circuitry that is as flexible as the mind, which can make split-second decisions (good or bad) based on literally thousands of experiences and factors -- without requiring a "full data set" in order to arrive at the "best decision".

The best example I can think of is "a WTC tower is falling down, what do I do? Do I run? and how far? When do I try to turn a corner to escape the dust blast? Do I altruistically tackle the person in front of me because I can tell that the only way they can survive is if I cover them at peril of my own existence? What about UA Flight 93? or any of the other thousands and perhaps millions of heroic acts we know of from just 9/11?? How do you program or develop electronic logic like that? Into mobile, autonomous units capable of effective action?

Not in our lifetime, methinks.

Top down vs. Bottom up

[Fly]

This article talks to people who are doing mostly or solely bottom-up work to emulate brain activities, and poo-poos the work that has been done on top-down approaches. While I don't think anyone can refute the need to do low-level bottom-up reverse-engineering to understand how our brains work, I agree with Hofstadter, et al. in _Fluid_Concepts_&_Creative_Analogies_ that there needs to be a fundamental change in the direction of top-down approaches.

I am intrigued by his work in combining the top-down and bottom-up work with his "codelets" design which relies on probabalistic results from a bottom-up approach that are weighted and driven in a more top-down manner. This higher-level approach is meant to simulate "mind" rather than "brain", but I'm eager to see just how far towards "mind" the neural approach in the article can be taken.

[youmaynotcare]It's cool to see McCormick in an AI article. My first course from him was AI, and it fascinated me.[/youmaynotcare]