Artificial Brain '10 Years Away' 539
SpuriousLogic writes "A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed.
Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already built elements of a rat brain.
He told the TED global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.
Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.
'It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,' he said."
Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
You know, we'd all be safe from the zombies if I HAD MY GODDAMN FLYING CAR ALREADY!
I mean, seriously, Jetsons was on, what, 40 years ago? What happened?
Unless, of course, the zombies can drive, in which case I'm sure we can all agree that we're fucked.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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Unless, of course, the zombies can drive, in which case I'm sure we can all agree that we're fucked.
You don't do much driving, do you ?
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Funny)
Even more, I did it twice, and it was quite pleasing to do both (my wife says so). The two brains came along with arms, legs and a lot of extras.
They deal with zombies every night they yield "Dadyyyyyyy! Bring me some water..."
don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Interesting)
Being able to build very complex models, based on what we do know, would be extremely valuable in telling us whether or not we are looking at the right structural details, and whether or not we are missing something(and, if so, the difference between our simulation, and the real thing).
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of what makes a brain's connections is genetic, and a lot is learned. It wouldn't even begin to function without the genetic component, and it wouldn't survive long or perform any useful task without the learned component. Getting the genetic part right is incredibly difficult (it took evolution millions of years before any organisms could just walk), and fundamentally necessary to get any use out of the brain.
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
What the heck are you talking about? None of this is metaphysical, it's theoretically possible with good enough imaging tools to make a 1:1 copy.
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It is theoretically possible, but the ~1000 cubic centimeter mass of the brain requires approximately 8*10^21 voxels of (5 nm)^3 imaging data just to get the structure--and that misses all of the proteins that are essential to get it to work, and we don't know how to turn those 80000 exabytes into anything useful for computation without going through by hand.
For the time being, it is "theoretically possible, practically impossible" to do it that way. And it will remain so for longer than ten years.
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
Several problems with that:
- When you're at the quantum level, you can't image it without changing it.
- Okay, so you've changed it. You're after general structure not the details of the instant? But what if the old AI guys were right, and the essence of being a mind is in the programming, not the hardware? Shuffling your image of the quantum-level stuff may mean you get a good image of the hardware, and miss getting a functional program for it entirely.
- Where are you going to store your image? This is not trivial. The human brain is orders of magnitude more complex than any other physical system known. Is there enough storage capacity on the planet to store the complete image details for one moment's slice of one human brain?
- Once you store something that complex, how in heck are you going to fabricate a duplicate? Over what span of time, with what tools, can you build to that spec?
Research projects like this are betting that with some drastic simplification you can build something roughly like a human brain, and that this roughest approximation will have useful parallels in operation. But the human brain isn't just electron firings. It's chemical cascades, electromagnetic fields, processing not just across synapses but within them, and quite possibly processing on the quantum level.
He's going to build something like that? In ten years? Really?
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
your roommate is a complete bastard
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'The man' is messing with you too?
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell you what: tell me how that thing with the car keys works (you know, the one where you look at the table three times and it isn't there, you search for it for 10 minutes elsewhere, and suddenly you see it right there where you looked before), and I'll believe you.
What's so special about that? The human eye can only see a very tiny fraction of your field of view in focus, everything else is very blurry and pretty much impossible to recognize unless you already know its there. On top of that your eye has a blind spot, everything in that is completly invisible. Your pattern recognition also doesn't work 100% perfect, if you see something upside down instead of the way you expect it, you might not recognize it or not recognize it fast enough and so your eyes might have moved on before the key was recognized.
Or to sum it up: The brain actively recognizes only a very tiny fraction of the world, everything else is interpolation and guesswork and if your key hides in the later part, you won't find it, especially if you don't expect it there. Seen this [youtube.com]? Pretty much the same thing.
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Interesting)
Often , in stressfull situations , the mind will think the same over and over , rather than thinking about something else.
It's the reason you keep opening that same closet , even though you look there a hundred times . Then , when you finally give up , your mind is free to think again , and you can remember it again.
This is because the brain makes various connections to areas in the brain , depending on past expierence.
For instance , i might have gotten a drink , and then accidentally put my keys in top of the fridge. You might not remember this , until you give up your search , and pour out a drink , which may activate that part of the brain , making you remember.
Re:don't believe it (Score:4, Funny)
Newage Skeptic: how can you model the brain you don't know how it works?
Scientist: we don't need to know how it works
Newage Skeptic: even if you do what you say how do you know it will work?
Scientist: our theories suggest that it will work
Newage Skeptic: but sometimes my car keys, I lose them and..
Scientist: what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Newage Skeptic: okay a simple wrong would've done just fine
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I wouldn't say Markram's opinion is in the majority. I know the field well, and I think that either he's sitting on a lot of super-ultra-exciting results that he has mysteriously not presented at the last conferences his team went to, or, more likely, is being hopelessly optimistic (or is confusing "years" and "centuries", or something).
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What makes you think we couldn't offer it stimuli? That would be one way to learn a hell of a lot about how it works. There's your learned component.
Also, who's to say we couldn't mimic the genetic component too? There is nothing magical about dna that makes it impossible to simulate. Although the whole protein folding thing seems rather difficult atm, there is no reason to say that we couldn't have that problem solved in 10 years.
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Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
I sometimes wonder though, if the component that gives intelligence is not necessarily that complicated. We seem very capable of adapting to new, abstract input, and this indicates to me that intelligence might be a generic mechanism. Allot of organisms are capable of learning, not just us. That's intelligence as far as I see.
My personal hypothesis (for what it's worth) is that what we will be able to build will be intelligent, but not necessarily very human. Humans have a genetic component, which includes instincts such as social behavior, and I think intelligence is a layer on top of this that helps us achieve the goals these instincts sets out for us. In the end, the instincts dictate what outcome appears good and bad, and reinforces the patterns of behavior that led to those outcomes.
It might be that once we set out to explore these underlying insticts, and how to replicate them in a brain like system, they might also prove to be surprisingly simple:
Probably it will be somewhat more complex than this, but I think we might be surprised once we get there. We might also find that tweaking instincts will make the brains, and their attached bodies, be human like or very very different. We might be able to create a brain for whom life is ALL about good feedback from humans (these creatures already live amongst us :p), or ones that are merciless killing machines.
I think no field will yield more knowledge and understanding of ourselves than the brain-builders in the decades to come.
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Interesting)
The brain is a self-modifying learning machine. Until you can build a self-modifying learning machine, you can have all the structure you want, it won't be functionally equivalent to a human brain.
Re:don't believe it (Score:4, Informative)
You don't have to build a self-modifying learning machine. You can emulate one of those via a machine that is not self-modifying. See:Turing completeness.
Depends (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends on what you mean by "functionally equivalent". A neural net is a simple self-modifying learning machine, and any detailed simulation of a network of actual neurons like the one TFA describes would certainly qualify.
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
don't forget the unexplained brain features that haven't been documented because science can't explain them - like twins feeling what the other feels and people with transplanted organs perceiving memories of the donor.
Explain?! It hasn't even been observed yet.
You might as well say "But your precious science has yet to explain psychic powers and zombies!"
Not so sure it hasn't been observed. (Score:4, Interesting)
The transplant thing has been observed, but so far I think it's only anecdotal evidence (maybe a bunch of people made stuff up, but so far I'll accept the reports on face value). Not aware of big research going on about it.
But I won't be surprised if scientists finally find out that your organs (or transplanted organs) can influence what sort of foods/drinks you'd want to consume[1], or even who you want to mate with. It does make some sense from an evolutionary advantage point of view.
[1] Like fried chicken and beer: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1096219000000135 [elsevier.com]
And if your entire immune system can change after a liver transplant, it means you're not just getting a liver - it's not quite so "neat and clean" as that.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/teen-changes-immune-system/story-e6frf00r-1111115390103 [dailytelegraph.com.au]
So if the donor's stem cells manage to leak out and help form neurons in the recipient's brain or "stomach brain"[2], why shouldn't there be changes?
[2] The Enteric Nervous System:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199905/our-second-brain-the-stomach [psychologytoday.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system [wikipedia.org]
Who is the boss? From the point of view of the ENS, the "central nervous system" (aka brain/CNS) might just be a means to keeping the ENS satisfied.
ENS to CNS: "Hey CNS go eat a double cheese burger!".
CNS: "Hmm, I feel like eating a double cheese burger, lets do a lot of complicated stuff like driving, walking etc so that I can eat that".
Of course the CNS could say, "Must resist, have to stick to diet".
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like twins feeling what the other feels
Thats coincidence and selective memory. If you have two people having random feelings, chances are, they end up feeling the same every now and then and if that happens on some special occasion, they remember it. On the other side they forget the thousands of hours in which nothing happened and in which they did feel completly different quite easily.
and people with transplanted organs perceiving memories of the donor.
Thats called making shit up. You can claim to perceive "memories" all day long, since as long as they are vague and unspecific, you can't prove anything with it.
Re:don't believe it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Since psychology doesn't comply as "real science", how can "scientists" duplicate the machine that controls most of human behaviour?
Brain itself operates on the edge of chaos [newscientist.com], it is also the organ that controls the minds of philosophers, musicians, painters, and artists. Computers only emulate "left-side
Re:don't believe it (Score:4, Informative)
Your brain does no such thing. When a bacterial infection is detected, it is detected by chemical differences between the cells that are part of the system and the invaders. Then, the cells that are part of the system end up releasing chemical changes that propagate through the system, and the immune system cells respond to that chemical signal.
Stop thinking of your body as a singular system operated by your brain. It isn't. It is a group of many different, isolated subsystems that work within the same enclosed environment for a common purpose...keeping themselves in a working environment.
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I assume that we'd basically adopt a strategy of "enlightened plagiarism": use our (nontrivial) imaging and structural analysis technology to get the best idea we can of the structure of a real brain(without necessarily understanding what it does, or why it is structured as it is).
I'm not convinced our imaging technology is going to be good enough for that in 10 years, though.
Every decade somebody claims we'll be able to simulate the human brain or build a human-level AI within 10 years, and always they're wrong, because they're only focusing on their own tiny aspect of the human brain or human intelligence, and ignore the complexity of other aspects or the complexity of how all those parts fit together. This overconfidence goes back to the 1950.
In other words: I'll believe it when I
Re:don't believe it (Score:4, Funny)
So he's gonna build a functional model of a brain, program in society driven angst and a genetic propensity for outlier behaviour and then treat the artifical responses as source for diagnosis and treatment - well "hello Dr. Frankenstein!".
Actually, us scientists have already built the artificial brain, and connected it to a historical copy of the web circa 2009. The brain has been designed in such a way that it has memories of past events, borrowed from other peoples lives and stitched together in an amusing way known as a "nerd". Because the brain is so obsessed with finding pictures of the opposite sex, and playing games, it doesn't even notice that all its limbs and senses are actually being generated by the array of computers operated by Google in 2009 (they were donated 8yrs after the cloud became self-aware). Coincidentally, that's why you feel a connection with them, and have projected one of your own behavioral laws upon them in your reality (it wasn't actually their motto in the real world).
Take no notice of this message. You are about to feel like eating a grilled cheese sandwich. Tomorrow we'll be testing your stress reactions on homoerotic situation #245. Enjoy the sandwich.
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Mmmmmmmm, grilled cheese sandwich. Brb.
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MRI can't get high enough resolution. You need to be able to image it on a molecular level. MRI would just tell you the structure of the brain. Its like saying you could play a copy of a video game if you had an accurate listing of the files in the game directory.
what? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, I have all these 10000x10000 TIFFs I just took of a real brain. Now what?
Guess what I mean is, the brain is not the same from a minute to the next. It modifies itself constantly. We may be able to copy the parts (although I'm pretty sure we're more than 10 years away from that) but until we can make it "run", all we have is a stopped engine. What good would that do?
Unless what we want is a brain _model_, which is what I think is meant by the article.
Morbo: MRI DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY (Score:3, Informative)
Hi-Resolution MRI. Just scan someones real brain and then load it onto the computer. We don't even need to know how a 'real' brain works.
There's a hard limit on MRI resolution, based on the rate at which water diffuses through brain tissue. That limit is around 5 microns. There are some tricks that might let us do better, but they tend to involve techniques that aren't compatible with live subjects (think cryogenics and antifreeze).
5 microns is enough to resolve some neurons, but not the axons and dendrites that connect them. And even if you could resolve the physical structure, function depends on chemical and electrical characteristics
Just one question... (Score:2, Insightful)
When can I put my ghost in a shell?
Re:Just one question... (Score:4, Funny)
obviously bash; it is competing with perl for title of largest dumping ground...
Not a replacement, folks (Score:4, Informative)
Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:5, Insightful)
An artificial brain of that complexity would be, in effect, a moral person. If you are willing to experiment on one, you might as well just use hobos and orphans and not have to wait a decade for fancy computers(though a simulation would have the huge advantage of read system state out of memory, no mucking around with FMRIs and stuff).
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I 100% agree with the need to protect sapient rights regardless of species or construction material you do have to approach this one slightly differently since the stakes are different.
If I was a silicon brain you could just back me up. As long as you disabled my pain processors you could do whatever you wanted to me. I would even be proud to be helping so many of my organic cousins at nothing but inconvenience. And since I'm a silicon brain with no where to go yet I wouldn't really have anything else to do except be retarded or schizophrenic from time to time.
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:5, Interesting)
And if this silicon brain decides that it's had enough of being experimented on?
And what if they don't turn your "pain receptors" off? What if they specifically want to experiment on you to see how much pain you can endure? If you think that medical scientists don't often do brutally unethical experimentation on "lesser" humans you'd be very very wrong (though since the 90's it's gotten much better in the west). As if they're going to care about a brain that they *created*. In fact I can see that as a selling point "see we can do these horrid experiments on this artifical brain so that we don't have to do it on orphans, prisoners and the institutionalised - like we used to".
Then again if you were regarded as a sentient being would they then have to keep you alive for the rest of eternity lest they be charged with murder if they turn you off or delete you?
If you create a sentient being you have a responsibility to that being and no you can't just kill it if you get bored with it or it just doesn't meet your expectations, otherwise there would be a hell of a lot more infanticide.
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But how does it help you if there happens to be some copy of you somewhere? If you were killed and that copy was restored, would it be you? Or would it just be a copy that resembles you? The scary thing about this question is that to all the observers (including the copy), the copy is you, and no harm has been done, even though the original "you" is dead.
I often think about this issue in terms of "Star Trek"-style transportation. That is, a person
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:5, Informative)
If you are willing to experiment on one, you might as well just use hobos and orphans and not have to wait a decade for fancy computers(though a simulation would have the huge advantage of read system state out of memory, no mucking around with FMRIs and stuff).
Using orphans, prisoners the military and even middle and lower class children as unknowing guinea pigs was never a problem for many scientists and DRs until the '70s.
Sorry scratch that for many it still isn't [bbc.co.uk].
One thing to notice is that various government departments are up to their arms in it as well.
Some choice examples:
(1957) "In order to study how blood flows through children's brains, researchers at Children's Hospital in Philadelphia perform the following experiment on healthy children, ranging in age from three to 11: They insert needles into each child's femoral artery (thigh) and jugular vein (neck), bringing the blood down from the brain. Then, they force each child to inhale gas through a facemask. In their subsequent Journal of Clinical Investigation article on this study, the researchers note that, in order to perform the experiment, they had to restrain some of the child test subjects by bandaging them to boards (Goliszek). "
(1962) New York University researcher Saul Krugman promises parents with mentally disabled children definite enrollment into the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, N.Y., a resident mental institution for mentally retarded children, in exchange for their signatures on a consent form for procedures presented as "vaccinations." In reality, the procedures involve deliberately infecting children with viral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of infected patients, so that Krugman can study the course of viral hepatitis as well the effectiveness of a hepatitis vaccine
(1962)
Researchers at the Laurel Children's Center in Maryland test experimental acne antibiotics on children and continue their tests even after half of the young test subjects develop severe liver damage because of the experimental medication (Goliszek).
(1963)
Researchers at the University of Washington directly irradiate the testes of 232 prison inmates in order to determine radiation's effects on testicular function. When these inmates later leave prison and have children, at least four have babies born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never follow up on the men to see the long-term effects of their experiment (Goliszek).
(1967)
Researchers paralyze 64 prison inmates in California with a neuromuscular compound called succinylcholine, which produces suppressed breathing that feels similar to drowning. When five prisoners refuse to participate in the medical experiment, the prison's special treatment board gives researchers permission to inject the prisoners with the drug against their will
(1968)
Planned Parenthood of San Antonio and South Central Texas and the Southwest Foundation for Research and Education begin an oral contraceptive study on 70 poverty-stricken Mexican-American women, giving only half the oral contraceptives they think they are receiving and the other half a placebo. When the results of this study are released a few years later, it stirs tremendous controversy among Mexican-Americans
(1990)
The CDC and Kaiser Pharmaceuticals of Southern California inject 1,500 six-month-old black and Hispanic babies in Los Angeles with an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. Adding to the risk, children less than a year old may not have an adequate amount of myelin around their nerves, possibly resulting in impaired neural development because of the vaccine. The CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected into their children was experimental (Goliszek).
I wonder how many here will defend these scientists and their experiments?
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet, we are just "atoms". Ever heard of emergent properties?
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Whoa there, "emergent properties" has two connotations--weakly emergent, which no one disagrees with, and "strongly emergent," which is something akin to magic happening if you mix the right things together. I hope you're not talking about the latter...?
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Science does ignore things outside of the universe, but amazingly enough, everything that matters is, by definition, inside it.
In other words, suppose there is a soul. If we can still make a brain simulator that acts conscious, then it doesn't really matter, because it had no observable effect. If, because humans have souls and computers don't, we can't make a conscious brain simulator, then the soul has an observable effect, and can be reasoned about with science. Now, in the first case, you might say that the brain simulator acts conscious but isn't. It would be a lot like saying people with a different skin color act conscious but aren't, though - not morally defensible.
Religions are not dualist because their ability to reason without evidence has allowed them to see some great truth that science has missed. They're dualist because they were conceived before we came to the great realization that the behavior of living things emerges from the physical laws.
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Back to the point at hand: suppose that an artificial brain without a "soul" did act similar to a human, but not exactly. How could we tell?
The giveaway is when it starts murdering people and folding origami ponies.
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I, for one, use my body as a way to get my head to important places.
I don't. I use my body to accomplish tasks and acquire information. It is unfortunate that physically separating my brain from my body is detrimental to both.
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:4, Interesting)
Fear is often preceded by astonishment, and is so far akin to it, that both lead to the senses of sight and hearing being instantly aroused. In both cases the eyes and mouth are widely opened, and the eyebrows raised. The frightened man at first stands like a statue motionless and breathless, or crouches down as if instinctively to escape observation. The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it palpitates or knocks against the ribs... That the skin is much affected under the sense of great fear, we see in the marvellous manner in which perspiration immediately exudes from it... The hairs also on the skin stand erect; and the superficial muscles shiver. In connection witih the disturbed action of the heart, the breathing is hurried. The salivary glands act imperfectly; the mouth becomes dry, and is often opened and shut.
- Charles Darwin The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
I do not doubt that an artificial brain could become self aware but for it to experience real, human emotions it would need to be embodied in an equivalent way.
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I think simulating the body reactions is a few orders of magnitude simpler than simulating the brain. Especially since it only needs to simulate the experience (e.g. the simulated stomach doesn't need to simulate the digestion of simulated food, it's enough if it emulates the filling state (and probably a few other simple data points).
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Evidence for that claim, please?
Everything I know about the subject points to the opposite. We need our senses and input from the external world to build our model of the world in the internal. Without sensory input, you would never have become yourself, nor anything even close. The body is a lot more than a biological car. There's a lot of feedback between the body and the brain.
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I, for one, use my body as a way to get my head to important places.
And people like this cannot get girlfriends. I don't understand it!
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are assuming that a computer program of that nature would be, for some reason, not conscious or thinking like a person. Yet why should you differentiate between a computer program and a physical neurons 'n glial cells, etc? I see no basis for doing so, as the matter itself, inert, is nothing. We only get a "person" when that matter if functioning. Why shouldn't consciousness, personhood, simply be the computational states and not the matter itself? It's true there are physical differences between a computer program and brain (for example, the synaptic gaps) but these could be simulated as well.
I have no reason to believe that consciousness/personhood is anything but substrate neutral. Man, machine, machine-man, or computer program, any of these can potentially be conscious. Unless you want to postulate silly metaphysical things such as souls, which are vague and poorly defined--and unnecessary, for a soul does not apparently hold that which makes us what we are, that is, our memories or inclinations.
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Man, if consciousness were materialistic in nature, I would be much happier.
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A computer simulation of a human brain is "just bits" in exactly the same sense as an ordinary human brain is "just atoms". Strictly speaking, neither has any moral properties inherent to it. As a matter of practical convention(and, resear
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Why would you be unable to aenesthetize an artificial brain? It's just a chemical that has some (currently not well understood) effect on the physical processes in your brain. If the artificial brain works by simulating those processes, it should be relatively straightforward to simulate those effects, and you should get the same temporary loss of consciousness.
I would say that consciouness is inherently tied to the algorithms that produce it. Those algorithms happen to be executed by a massively paral
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Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:5, Insightful)
My comment about anesthesia was that a simulation of a thing, is *not* the thing in question it's hard for naive physicalists to grasp,
What you fail to see is that conciousness is not a physical thing. Your physicalist rules which apply to thing (a simulation of X is not an X) therefore do not apply to conciousness. Perhaps if you dould define conciousness, the debate might become easier. I suspect you can't because noone has so far.
"I think, therefore I am". That's all you really know. You can't tell that anyone else around you is really real. They appear "concious" and so you choose to call them "concious". You deduce that purely by ovserving their behaviour and actions: you observe no internal process. So why can't a machine be deemed concious by the same rules?
10 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Btw 10 years and i still have some bad english
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's very simple to see why this happens. When you start a project, or even just a stage of a project, you have some list of problems and you may even have some idea of the solutions. You can use good judgement to estimate the time it takes (at least to some order of magnitude), and rounding off to 10 years makes for good press.
But when you actually begin the work, every problem you solve illuminates a whole new set of problems to solve. If each solution opens up more than one new problem, you've "increased" the amount of work left to be done. So either you cut back on some of the goals (to reduce the list of problems) or you admit it wasn't as simple as you thought and announce a new project to tackle some subset of the new set of problems.
Re:$10,000 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:10 years? (Score:4, Funny)
Translation: How long before no one will remember or care what sensationalist claim I made. Hopefully I'm outta here by then. I know. 10 years!
It's like the 100 and 1000 year longevity of CDs. Those companies are counting on the fact that they won't be around to sue!
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The flying car, for instance, is usually thought of as a technological hope; but it might be more accurate to say that it is, rather, a dream of a future where the middle class can afford helicopters, or the
Re:10 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been listening "in 10 years we'll have X awesome technology", but time come and go and nothing has changed, so, i'll be expecting this artificial brain so i could drive my flying car(you know, that 3D driving thingie) to arrive at the entrance of the spacial elevator so i could bang some lunar chicks.
Not everything predicted has come true, to be sure. But think about it: you are leaving a post on a computer located hundreds or thousands of miles away, along with hundreds of other people, and I, hundreds or thousands of miles away, am replying. Neither of us pays much at all for this service, which is nearly ubiquitous.
You can casually watch television shows on demand, on your phone. Which, BTW, is roughly analogous to the pocket communicators on the original series of "Star Trek", except that they couldn't watch shows or take video/pictures or blog or play solitaire on them.
There is sufficient storage in your computer to track every single man, woman, and child on earth, many times over. The price of photovoltaic solar cells has followed a consistent, exponential drop in price (half price every 5-ish years) and is now close to parity with coal.
Cars are many, many, many times safer than they used to be - most accidents now result in basically no significant injuries, even when the car is totalled, thanks to crumple zones. Flat panel TVs are commonplace, with resolutions that rival photographic paper. Flexbile, folding displays are available, if (still) expensive.
I'm not sure what kind of changes you would expect, but these are just a few of the awesome technologies that I've seen unfold in my 30-something years. I mean, what do you want?!?!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed. " -- William Gibson
People are still awaiting ubiquitous computing to come, but for some countries (Singapure, Korea), it is already here. G Bell [uci.edu]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's mostly because the media isn't reporting science stuff very well.
AI researcher says: "We're working on a pattern-matching system based on the way the human brain functions, and we think we will have a working prototype within five to ten years."
Mainstream media headline: "Intelligent robots will conquer the world five years from now."
We did make a huge progress in AI, for example. The people who really thought a computer would have human intelligence within their life were always in the minority. But
Go with eleven years (Score:4, Funny)
Then you won't have to listen to the cliche that an artificial brain will always be 10 years away. No one would use eleven years in a cliche.
Re:Go with eleven years (Score:5, Funny)
No one would use eleven years in a cliche.
Spinal Tap would.
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Yeah. RIght. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Yeah. RIght. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is different from AI, and is coming from someone whose expertise on the subject is demonstrable. He's not talking about AI, he's talking about simulating all of the tissue in a human brain and providing it with stimuli to determine reactions.
He's not saying it'll necessarily be a good ol' buddy ol' pal right off the bat. Probably not. Probably won't even be capable of simple arithmetic for years. On the other hand, we could simulate things like lesions effecting far away parts of the brain, various known "paths" that signals travel in the brain and ways to alter those paths or correct flaws, etc.
As well, we could simulate the effect of various drugs on large-scale phenomena in the brain to help try and understand (a.) what a drug will do before it undergoes testing, and (b.) why exactly it is that makes these drugs work so well. Both questions are currently unanswerable. We know what a drug does, but rarely do we understand the full extent of why a particular drug helps certain conditions.
Still Waiting on Cancer Cure (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm still waiting on the scores of cancer cures that have been promised over the past decade. Talk is cheap.
Re:Still Waiting on Cancer Cure (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk is generally PR hype; but sometimes the PR department is attached to people who do real work.
Make it the other way around (Score:2)
Might be easier and more practical to build an artificial human body that would accept a living human brain. It would likely solve a lot more debilitating illnesses than the opposite approach. Frankly, I would get into the queue right now.
Still, I am sure building a simulation of a human brain must be challenging.
Jeez, I hope not (Score:2)
Or, on a more pragmatic level, creating a brain is great and fine. Creating all the data that your eyes, ears, nose, and nerve endings create, or to basically make its own artificial world, would be insane. And even if you could, you wouldn't get a true human mind, because they wouldn't
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Brain impairment (Score:5, Funny)
"Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said."
Only two billion? Sounds kind of low. My estimate is more in the neighborhood of 6-7 billion.
Re: (Score:2)
Most of those do not have a real brain impairment. It's just that so many people waste so much time on /. they're as productive as the average coma-patient.
TED (Score:2, Funny)
Has TED always been about giving nutjobs a platform for performance art?
Unclear just what they mean (Score:3, Informative)
Just what do they mean by a model of the brain? I really don't think they mean anything that would actually think.
Especially if you believe the few numbers given. If it takes a laptop's computing power to completely model a single neuron then there won't be enough computing power on the planet in ten years to model an entire human brain. There aren't even enough IPv4 addresses for that. We would be talking a cluster that needs IPv6 to talk between it's nodes.
And that wouldn't account for the computing needed to simulate the I/O signals to make a simulated brain able to do anything useful.
Hooray for science (Score:2)
Thank god this guy presented his findings at a conference instead of through peer-reviewed journal papers. Could you imagine how hard it would be to find research money going through those stuffy old channels?
RIGHT NOW (Score:2)
they're talking about this on Coast-to-Coast with George Noory
One word: Crackpot (Score:2)
We currently have no clue how the brain works and we are just starting to try to figure it out. Just look at when Theoretical Neuroscience began and how much they actually know. Let's just say it's new. As in, we know next to nothing about what goes on in the brain.
Still need convincing? Well, just look at any of the pysch meds out there. The thought is that mental issues are brain chemistry. Well, the drugs change the brain chemistry as soon as they are in the system. Yet, it can take weeks (or mont
If only we understood the architecture (Score:5, Insightful)
It probably is within reach to build a hardware equivalent of a human brain. We don't know how to architect it, but building enough custom ICs and interconnecting them is probably within reach. The right architecture for simulating neurons probably involves some huge number of fast processors with limited memory, like a graphics board.
I'm encouraged that this guy is trying to model a mouse brain. About twenty years ago, I was at a seminar by Rod Brooks. He was talking about trying to jump from insect-level AI, where he'd made some progress, to human-level AI. I asked him why he was trying to make such a big jump; a mouse brain might be within reach. He said "Because I don't want to go down in history as the person who created the world's greatest robot mouse". So instead, Brooks did Cog, a stationary robot with head and arms which tries to fake acting human and didn't really lead anywhere. Taking a smaller step might work better.
Reaching for mouse-level AI is promising. Mice and humans have about 85% DNA commonality. All the mammals seem to have have roughly similar brain components, although the size ratios of the different sections vary widely. Humans have about 1000x the brain mass of a mouse. So if we can get a solid simulation of a mouse brain, it may be mostly a scaleup from there.
The classic mistake in AI is that someone comes up with a reasonable idea, and then thinks they're one step from human-level AI. That's approaching the problem as if it were easy. Fifty years in, we can now conclude it is hard. So taking smaller bites is indicated.
When we build an artificial brain, it will be rack-mounted in 19 inch racks.
Is that the cold fusion of medicine? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, fusion power has been 10 years away for the last 40some years...
A bit misguided, no? (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you define one's psyche and how is "mental health" or "mental illness" defined, and on what set of values?
Say I'm a chronic masturbator (to be in tune with the slashdot mentality) and it's considered "defective behavior" even though my body rewards me to do continue that habit.
So, he would build a synthetic copy of my brain, emulate my current state and that's it.
Now, my brain is in constant evolution, I have eroding neurons, I learn new things making new neuron-paths, which his machine wouldn't be able to the way I imagine it.
Would he allow the brain to rewrite and rewire itself? And if so, how? Are these processes well understood enough?
If they would be understood, and able to emulate, will they write "virtual medication" to influence the virtual brain to test side-effects or the propagation of a certain chemical interacting with the brain?
If the last is possible, will we end up with sentien beings who are stuck in the same state for an eternity? Wouldn't that be sortof agonizing?
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Seems to be missing something (Score:3, Insightful)
What most neuroscience appears to be missing is that the brain isn't an electrical system, but an electro-chemical system. To my knowledge, no one has done anything to simulate how the chemical interactions work with the signal passing and processing aspects of neurology. I think it is quite apparent that there are a great many connections between the chemical balance of the human body and how well things are working in various parts of the human body work. We already have some clues in observing how stuff like lithium helps to dampen activities in the brain preventing or suppressing many results of "mental disease." So if chemical influence can have such a profound affect, I find it is more than reasonable that chemical influence can also be a profound cause.
It would appear that scientists are trying to "memory map" the brain as a computer which is simply the wrong approach I believe. Sure there will be some improvement in understanding of how some aspects of things work, but I think they will quickly reach a plateau with this approach.
it's already been done, Dixie Flatline (Score:3, Interesting)
Go re-read Neuromancer to see how all this turns out. Every time you turn the damn artificial brain on it's the same deadpan backseat driver.
It was disturbing to think of the Flatline as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, kneejerk responses. ...
He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in.
It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder.
He coughed. "Dix? McCoy? That you man?" His throat was tight.
"Hey, bro," said a directionless voice.
"It's Case, man. Remember?"
"Miami, joeboy, quick study."
"What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?"
"Nothin'."
"Hang on." He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it. "Dix? Who am I?"
"You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?"
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Aw, shit. We're all gonna die..
Maybe not. Taking the claim at face value, then we'll never be quite dead: there will be always a copy of our brain somewhere ready to be loaded into a VM by some system admin.
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there will be always a copy of our brain somewhere ready to be loaded into a VM by some system admin.
So you think this isn't happening now? Ahhh that's nice I wanna live in your world, mine sucks with all these wires and this slimey bath I'm in . . . Hey! Who opened the shoot!?
Re:Goddammit. (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe not. Taking the claim at face value, then we'll never be quite dead: there will be always a copy of our brain somewhere ready to be loaded into a VM by some system admin.
If it's our system admin doing the backup and restore then I don't like our chances.
Re:Goddammit. (Score:5, Funny)
Sinners go to /dev/null.
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If the robots are human brain powered, who are we to say that they aren't human?