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."
Not a replacement, folks (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:don't believe it (Score:3, Informative)
Re:don't believe it (Score:3, Informative)
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:2, Informative)
Here's an idea, "prove" consciousness exists in humankind. Though it may exist, it's clearly not required to be functional in our society, is it?
Re:Seems ethically dodgy... (Score:3, Informative)
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 parallel self-modifying chaotic biological organ, but, being algorithms, they could in principle be carried out by other hardware. (The strong Church-Turing thesis.) Granted, our crude attempts to design similar algorithms from first principles (Bayesian networks, predicate logic, expert systems, etc.) are so different from what happens in the brain that it's fair to say they are not the same thing. But that's not what these guys are doing - they're not reverse-engineering the software, they're emulating it at a low level.
I suspect the only real barriers are technical - how do you get sufficient information about the structure of the brain, and how it changes over time? How do you learn which aspects of that are important and which can be abstracted? And how do you get it running sufficiently quickly?
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.
Re:don't believe it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:don't believe it (Score:3, Informative)
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. On the other side if you would remember specific stuff, like the name of an anonymous donor, his phone number, etc. then you would have some good testable evidence that something special is going on, but so far, I don't think that has ever happened.
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.
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 that don't show up in MRI at all. fMRI gives a very coarse representation of activity, at the cost of vastly reduced spatial resolution.