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Artificial Brain '10 Years Away'
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."
So now we can feed them to the future invasion of zombies? That way we can all co-exists.
Maybe we can build the *equivalent* of a human brain (number of neural connections in software, silicon or combination), but we don't even know how the thing functionally works as it is. How are we going to model it?
When can I put my ghost in a shell?
Aw, shit. We're all gonna die. Wake me up when the evil human brain powered robot invasion ends.
It is some supercomputer software to simulate a brain. Still cool!
I'd be pretty concerned about the ethics of experimenting on an artficial brain complex enough to reasonably simulate a human one. "Human rights" aren't terribly well grounded, theoretically; but to the degree that they are, mental complexity seems to be a vital factor(given that we don't generally execute retarded people, it isn't the only one, but it is a big one). Being made of meat isn't obviously a salient factor, nor is being born to human parents.
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).
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.
Btw 10 years and i still have some bad english
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
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.
In 10 years we will have artificial brain, in 50 we will have fusion. In 20 we will have true AI and cyborg. And in 5 years the date estimate for the 3 above will probably not have changed by much (I say probably as we could do leap and bound forward, but at the moment I don't see that as probable).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'm still waiting on the scores of cancer cures that have been promised over the past decade. Talk is cheap.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Awesome!
Now theres no excuse for people being totally clueless fools!
But i suppose most major religions will not support the use of artificial brains. So yeah... not much improvement i guess. :(
And in 2 months, the Pandora will be released!
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.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
I'm not sure if humanity is ready to handle the issues with creating a human brain in an electronic test tube. What do you do when it comes time to turn the experiment off and it yells "Don't do that! I don't want to die!"?
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 be exposed to other intelligent human beings in its environment, because that's what you've been trying to create in the first place!
"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.
World is gonna end in 2012 anyways...
Has TED always been about giving nutjobs a platform for performance art?
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.
Democrat delenda est
Another factor contributing to this is the fact that people have less and less ability to make accurate predictions of what the world will be like in another 10 years, so just throwing it out as a guess as to when your project will be finished seems more and more reasonable (and longer estimates seem more and more disconnected from the here-and-now, so they make for worse press, and are less likely to be used).
I'm sorry to disappoint you. It will last much more than 10 years (if ever (!)) to make/simulate human brains. How can you be so naive damn-it. Nature (with it's super-sophisticated laws (which we are far from close to fully understand)) was "modelling" human brains for billions of years (from an "one-cell creature" and on and on) and some beleive a man can build it "just like that" in a snap? Forget about it. Yes, computer are faster and faster every day (algorithms get better, etc.), but intuitive-abstract-intelligent-thinking is another thing. Some of you really underestimate the complexity of the nature :-)
Assume it's true--can I then have my brain augmented with this to make me smarter? A mathematical savant? More perceptive?
If he believes we're anywhere near this level of technology, then his brain is clearly simple enough to simulate. Even today.
it sucks
'It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,' he said."
weinersmith
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?
they're talking about this on Coast-to-Coast with George Noory
"Lame" - Galaxar
We should fund his research! Because 10 years would be such an improvement on the record of Nature and God, who manage to do the job in less than nine months ...
Besides, every self-respecting Mad Scientist needs a brain in a jar! Don't ask why, they just do.
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 months) after reaching an effective dose to get a therapeutic response. So, again, we know next to nothing.
Ten years?!?!? My fucking eye.
I was worried about what might happen when the mice want to puree my brain in an attempt to get at the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. It's reassuring to know that soon an artificial brain actually will be available to replace mine. I'll be able to ask for tea and everything!
What if the artificial brain is gay? What happens to its "rights" then?
Perhaps people may see that our consciousness and sense of 'self' is not within the brain. It will raise some interesting questions. If the self isn't within the liver... or the heart... or the brain... perhaps, if it is not even within the body... then where is it?
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
Brain?
Brain?
What is BRAIN?
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
I'll plunk down a $10,000 bet here and now that this artifical brain aint going to happen.
said blonde
God's gift to chicks
Do you reckon we'll get natural speech recognition first?
Keep one to experiment on, but teach the other all about how to build systems and how to design itself, then tell it to go and design a better version. Call it Multivac, ask it if entropy can ever be reversed and wait for the salvation of the human race :)
I'm old school, I guess, but I think there is an unbridgeable chasm between computer software and human intelligence. We have no problem killing (relatively intelligent) pigs, for example, for food. I would put bits and bytes as much lower on my own personal "value scale" than pigs. I simply cannot believe that a computer program is worthy of respect as a life form. I know this idea has been popular on sci-fi shows the last few decades, but I don't get it all. Although I'm a die-hard atheist, I distinguish between a living being and a program, and don't believe a computer program can feel pain. This is all bullshit, as far as I can tell. Dean
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
when you look at the state of our politicians, maybe we'd better off with an artificial one leading us.....
Are we making an artificial brain or an artificial mind? And if we're making a mind, do we treat it like a human, with rights and such? And what do we do if it asks to die? After all, it'd be our fault for bringing it into being. Are we really ready for this sort of responsibility? Assuming we can actually "make" a "brain", I think the sort of ethical and moral problems that come up will be pretty deep stuff.
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
Fascinating stuff for sure but when can I upload my own mind to such an artificial brain? Then I could be immortal! (as long as the batteries don't run flat)
Make multiple copies and fire them off into space for a '5 year mission' and when/if they return do a brain dump. Neat!
"There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder," he told the audience.
If somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 of your population are outside the norm then your metric is either really screwed or we are in the middle of some kind of catastrophic evolutionary event, perhaps humans are getting ready to fork into several species!!!
It can drive my flying car.
Who is John Galt?
and let the Unborn God sort them out
Having the complexity of the human brain would imply self-awareness, and being aware of itself, it ought to realize that it is a simulation, not an actual human being. So it would appear that one would have to shut off that self-awareness from a potential simulation and lie to it about its state if we want to simulate the human brain.... but then unless one is proposing that we, too, are living in a simulated universe (matrix references aside here), how could it be said that a simulation so-limited is accurately modeling the human mind, including its ability to be cognizant of itself?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Well, these things are being developed for the same use that artificial hearts are being used for, aren't they?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
...if you program it to feel pain, or if you program it to learn to feel pain.
... we can upload our conciseness to a cybernetic brain, although I don't anything against this project, I wonder if I can also be used to improve a normal humans cognitive ability.
... our new remote controlled president!
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
All Your Peoples Are Belong To Us
... except when we're trying to model mental illness, and we don't know all the many genetic factors (let alone environmental ones -- diet, allergies, etc.) that might come into play. That's one of my bigger beefs with this Markram guy -- his whole premise rests on modeling, but to accurately model anything, you have to know at least most of what's going on, and with mental illness, we really have only the faintest glimmerings of a clue as to what's going on. The more you deal with corner cases, the more accurate your model needs to be to get an accurate understanding -- and mental illnesses are certainly the corner cases.
I certainly wish the effort good luck, but I won't be holding my breath that they find the "cure" to all mental illness. My less cynical and more realistic hope is that they help establish a solid foundation for future modeling efforts.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
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.
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.
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
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
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
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric_nervous_system
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".
I mean, fusion power has been 10 years away for the last 40some years...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"In ten years, [fantastical AI technology] will be a reality!" I feel like I've heard that somewhere before :)
Not to dismiss the idea. The world needs optimists to take on bold projects like this. But it also needs people in charge who can realistically evaluate what the former are doing.
It only stands to reason that this is how the Tyrell Corporation, makers of the Nexus 6 model, got started.
It will take a huge amount of patience to teach such a brain. I think, nobody is ever ever as patient with a computer as with another human being.
So after this new kind of brain works, at least another 10 years of learning / teaching? And then start over again...
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
I don't understand !
Where's the Tea?
...in 10 years.
Here's the thing: I'm not the director of an institute that has spent 15 years studying the brain, and I'm willing to bet you aren't either. In these situations, it's generally wise to accept the majority opinion of those considerably more educated in that field than oneself (see: climatology), so forgive us if we take his word over yours.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
It's not going to happen in ten years, and I sort of know what I'm talking about (I've been working on neural models of language processing for quite some time now). First, the brain is huge, really huge. The number of "connections" isn't even known, let alone how everything interconnects. Second, even at the level of a single neuron, there are quite a few problems to be solved. If we could figure out the exact structure of a human brain, but emulate it just using integrate-and-fire type neurons, I predict it would fail miserably. Third, brains change. We don't know how we start out, but our brain changes from learning (if you want to be bewildered: development of cat vision is fascinating). For our brain to reach a stage in which it could be subject to a mental disorder takes some 15 years of normal life, i.e. inside a body that functions in a society. So even if someone could build a baby brain in 10 years, and incorporate it into a very human looking body, it would still take 15 years to develop and then might just not have developed a mental disorder.
Fourth, we don't have a clue as to where to look for mental disorders. Of course, if you have a virtual brain, you could tweak parameters, but not only are these parameters at this moment unknown, it would also be unethical (for it would hurt a person, see also other threads), and still this would not offer more insight into the emergent property that mental disorder is as comparing people with these disorders at this moment.
Concluding, this is a seriously flawed project.
The error here is that there is no real property called 'humanity' as such that you can find and pinpoint anywhere.
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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
We don't need to know anything about the physics or psychology of orchestras in order to get a decent facsimile onto a plastic disc.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I don't think simulating a brain is impossible.
I do think by truly doing so the result would grow concious, else it's not a proper simulation.
But I think we are no where near the understanding to be able to do this.
The brain is the most complex arrangement of matter we know of. Much of this kind of research seams to rely on each cell not really doing any computation, but my bet is that they do. My bet is each cell some kind of mini computer, and how brain is a insanely complex dynamic network of these.
I think we will be enhancing our brains before we can create new ones.
...you're absolutely correct. In 10 years however, the situation may have changed.
Biggest mistake people can make is to assume that tomorrow will simply be a faster version of today.
Well, besides getting involved in a land war in Asia, of course.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Babies don't do a whole lot after they are born. Perhaps they can model an adult brain from the start, but I doubt it will act very human without years of experiencing the sensory
input of a human body. The way the human senses are wired to the brain I suspect has a lot to do with how the brain is segmented into areas with specific tasks. What a human brain-like lump of simulated neurons will be able to do is anyones guess. I'm sure looking forward to any experiments, even though this opens up a pandora's box of ethical dilemmas.
Will the simulated brain feel pain? Have fears?
Henry Markram seems too optimistic, but if he's right then this might be the starting shot for the singularity.
A witty
on one proviso: the conscious entity, silicon or otherwise, must be given a free choice as to whether to participate.
Everything else is secondary, or just irrelevant.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
You're neglecting those who have both a myspace and a facebook. Your failure to consider this basic confounding variable suggests that YOU are mentally impaired. This would further suggest that your hypothesis is incorrect; it's entirely possible that people who use neither website are impaired, and those who do are not necessarily impaired.
This scathing criticism is brought to you by a user a both websites.
1959, 1969, 1979, 1989, or 1999?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Funny thing, I'm at the Computational NeuroScience (CNS) conference right now, and the previous talk started with a satirical comment on Markram's statement : "a leading scientist of our field just said we could make artificial brains in ten years. let's start now, we have a lot of work to do."
members of Congress can wait that long to get one.
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.
If a human brain can be artificially constructed then it stands to reason that it should be capable of preserving itself since humans can. A human brain with knowledge of its own limitations then has only one resort: confidence trickery. If it knew its own existence was threatened it may well turn into a 2001: Space Odyssey-esque showdown vs Hal.
Assuming that we are capable of making artificial human brains, we shouldn't be doing this!
(P.S. Seriously though, I hope this artificial brain gets built.)
Someone please post a link to the actual TED talk video.
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?"
=S
He's not modeling brains, he's modeling neocortical minicolumns. Theoretically that's not too difficult. I did a schematic for a subset of a minicolumn, a Hebbian cellular assembly. A collection of those in a minicolumn can process some significant chunks of information, given in/out infrastructure.
But, as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_column a minicolumn contains about 80 neurons, and there are 50 to 100 minicolumns in a (hyper)column. That's 4000 to 8000, cut it down the middle and say 6000. There are 2 million hypercolumns in a human cortex. According to Markram he's modeling things with a processor representing a neuron. To build a human cortex he'll need 12 billion processors. That's 1.2 million Big Blues. Good luck on getting IBM to fork those over.
But to model it right, the neurons have to be interconnected so that none are more than 6 hops away from any other, with an average of 3 hops. The Connection Machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_machine would be a better choice to match the connectivity. A fully tricked out CM-1 had 65,536 processors, so the artificial human brain would need 183106 CM-1's with the machines interconnected in hypercubic fashion just as they're wired internally. That's a lot of iron. Worse, the CM-1 used single bit processors. The CM-5 used SPARC RISC processors, and we'll assume for brevity that they can do the job Markram wants done. A fully packed CM-5 could carry 16384 processors http://home.wlu.edu/~whaleyt/classes/parallel/topics/cm.html a quarter the number in a CM-1, so 4 times as many machines -- 732,421 hypercubic networked machines. That's about 21000 times more machines than were built, and those carried no more than 1024 processors. To get this artificial brain going Danny Hillis needs to get his soldering gun warmed up.
The CM-5 has a 900 m^2 footprint www-csag.ucsd.edu/individual/achien/cs433/papers/jpdc95.ps , so the requisite collection would cover 255 square miles plus access space and a massive amount of cable space for the interconnection.
In the absence of machine specs, I'll use the estimate of power consumption per compuational nose used in a Los Alamos paper comparing their options when they were shopping for some heavy iron. That estimate produces a probable power requirement for the CM-5 array modeling an entire human cortex at 12 to 24 gigawatts.
I don't disagree too strenuously that a design could be done in 10 years. But the collection of machines, even given advances in technology? Make it 100 to 200.
Then comes the final shot fired: why the hell would anyone cripple some perfectly good hardware by forcing it to act in such a capricious, error prone fashion as a human brain? Why not also buy an airplane and just taxi it down the streets rather than using a car? We already know that stem cells can be used to repair brain damage. Better to apply the appropriate technology to the problem.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
They can have sex today and have one after 9 months(Conditions apply of course)
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I hope ghost transplant isn't too far behind.
The question is probably not scientific. It will be the churches who get to decide if they allow scientists to create artificial brains or not. It really doesn't matter if the research is public or private financed, religion has a strong link with the fabric of the society and if they say no, they have enough followers to effect pressure to stop.
Faith holds the Supreme Cause created the humans and specifically gave them soul. Therefore creating a perfect copy of the brain "hardware" goes nowhere, it would be a digital Lilith at most. You need the gift of soul, a transcendental "firmware" to make it a self-aware sapient being. Would God give soul to silicon brains or would they destroy them with a rain of fire to erase such outrage against nature from the face of Earth, only He can know.
Articifical brains will probably be just another big crash, like the Tower of Babel was.
I have a feeling this one's going to be "ten years out" for rather a lot more than ten years.
I don't care to speculate on exactly how many orders of magnitude the "ten year" estimate falls short, but I'm pretty sure it does fall short by orders of magnitude.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Yes!! I am putting my new artificial brain right next to my flying car I was promised was "10 years" away.
My old brain's getting tired.
I concur. He is probably correct with that 10 year estimate.
Would it have mind and soul? Omar
Even though I'm almost positive that noone will figure it out before I die, this sounds like the beginnings of Ghost in the Shell style cyberization. Of course, there are alot of issues to be solved as well, such as the copying of one brain to another, as well as consciousness and the like, but still, everything has got to have a first step. Now if only these types of scientists could stop saying "We could do this in blah blah timespan" and just do it already.
Progress, for the past forty years an artificial brain has been 15 years in the future. Now it's only ten. I think there is an inverse version of Moores law in there.
...and then give them synthetic brains. Such people would serve as a living, mobile organ donor farm. The synthetic brain could control bodily functions - just enough to keep the organism alive. As the technology advances, we would find a way to adapt Linux to the synthetic brain, at which point these brainless "things" (which would have no legal rights) could be used as a substitute for the illegal alien workers we have today. Except these would never go on strike or collect welfare. Certain concepts like pleasure or civil liberties could be deliberately left out (much like the features of a Verizon phone). They would feel no pain, and would follow their programming relentlessly.
What could possibly go wrong?
'nuff said.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those brains....
It's a sad sad day for me to say that. I've just turned 40.
And have more fun doing it.
At least, I can get the process started. And I'll need the assistance of a woman for nine months and a few minutes.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
sudo 'make me a sammitch' will do something around my house!
Good people go to bed earlier.
Probably not. Building a simulated brain isn't the same thing as simulating a specific brain, so it's unlikely Greg Egan's copies are coming any time soon...
I thought we were going to have Fusion power in 10 years, for the last 20 years, and in 2010 it will be 30 years!
People have been making these sort of nonsense predictions for a long time now.
We have no clue how the human brain works. If we did, we would be restoring peoples neurological abilities after accidents. That is not going to happen any time soon.
Ok, so we can look at the connections of the cells under a microscope.
I say so what.
Trying to replicate the physical structure of something does not prove you understand how it works.
Sorta like people carving a statue of Big Foot after they saw the real thing in the woods and then scientists proclaiming it was a genus of man which branched from the primate tree 10 million years ago.
What nonsense.
We can't even make people walk after they cut any portion of the brain stem.
Look at stem cells for example. The have repaired peoples hearts after heart attacks. How do they work?
Nobody knows, it just does!!!
We won't have a working human brain in 10 years or even 100 years.
Does anyone here think the problem is THAT SIMPLE?
It took evolution 5 billion years to solve this problem of a intelligent, sentient brain.
Not only that, evolution could only do it just once on this planet in all that time!
Unless of course someone here has proof of some other species which can classified as sentient?
Yeah, I thought so.
Me thinks the good doctor has some more PhD work to do, and he should stop being a sensationalist.
-gc
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Pull the other one, there's bells on it!
Every time somebody claims they'll have an artificial brain/mind/intelligence or whatnot, I am tempted to go into either the anti-materialist argument, the unknown complexity argument, or the modeling only observations argument against this folly.
The I remember the problem has a much simpler destructive argument:
I am still waiting for the convincing artificial flower.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Personality disorders are created by experience. If kids are letting the air out of your tires, why replace the car ?
his universally-shared complaint!
The first part of creating a human brain will only take 10 years. The problem is powering it in a small form factor. This requires Fusion, which is still about 50 years out.
If we are going to have artificial brains in ten years then my project Samus needs to be speed up. I was planning on a fifteen year release, but I can cut some corners.
All I need now is a hot chick willing to try on my power suit, but mother will not allow me to bring girls into the basement where my laboratory is.
...always has been, always will be!
It's not as hard as it sounds, we just need to find the right subject to model our virtual brain on. Then, we figure out how to get all those virtual neurons and connections to generate the following output:
"What?"
"I don't understand!"
"Where's the tea?"
Research funding, here I come!
Around seven billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.
Fixed.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
It's only a matter of time before someone buys a brain on eBay loaded with top secret government files.
I can say [REDACTED] anytime I want!
FYI the simulation is running on this machine: http://top500.org/system/7388
"It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years."
I'm relieved to see that tradition of excessive and unjustified optimism by yesterday's AI crowd is still alive and kicking. It's just too bad that a self-aggrandizer like Markram is using it to give false hope to sick people.
Announcing the arrival of a man-made human brain in 10 years, without first having built anything but simulations is so irresponsible and ultimately hope-despairing that there damn well ought to be a law.
Better yet, ask Markram to sign his promise in blood -- if he fails to deliver, he donates his own brain to the cause. His ex-corpus cerebrum may do little medical good, but at least it'll do no more harm.
"Impairment" is relative. For example, those diagnosed with A.D.D. may have been great hunters in another era, catching 10 rabbits a day. Kobe Bryant would possibly be diagnosed with ADD in today's schools, but all that energy has made him a master in sports.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
10 years? Which will be out first, Duke Nukem, or Brain 1.0? Maybe Duke Nukem will be able to finish itself if the brain forecast is true.
Table-ized A.I.
If that artificial brain somewhat reacts like human one, maybe should have a name, something that reflects its probable deep education and insigfulness. I suggest Abe. Abe Normal.
This same prediction was made by the fathers of Artificial Intelligence in the 1960s. School boys now have computers in their bedrooms a million times more powerful than then. I am stillwaiting for this predictionto come true.
I say let's all go watch "The Brain That Wouldn't Die". Wonderfully trashy.
There is a ton of accelerating research on modeling the human brain at a very fine level of detail. The 'actual number of neurons', wiring, etc.. is the easy part. The hard part, is the modeling of what is actually going on, and there is a great amount of progress in that area.
Basically, the models of each region of the brain have improved as each scanning technology has improved. MRI's, etc.. are able to scan at a smaller scale as tech improves, and researchers are able to watch actual neurons doing 'things' as controlled input is delivered to either animals or humans.
There are also many invasive techniques, like physically hooking up wires to primate brains, and watching how the impulses change when the primate is trained to do X, etc..
Whether or not you agree with this author's conclusions, his book has an excellent summary (as of 2005 :)) of the various modeling efforts and there level of success
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_is_Near
No one has the complete brain modeled yet, but enough of the pieces are being worked on, that it wouldn't surprise me at all to see them come together into a unified model a decade from now.
Great, now everything is set to making the ideal citizen... if you challenge the laws, just call them mentally unstable, replace the part of the brains with the conforming part! Big brother rules! All your brains are belong to us!
How can a synthetic brain be built when we don't know enough of how the real thing works?
My Manager has one... but I think it might be broken.
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This is soooooo not happening. This sort of technology has habitually fallen behind expectations. Is there an acronym or some sort to label for posts on slashdot that are overblown and improbable hype?
Wasn't it 10 years away 10 years ago?
It's entirely possible that the literature I've been reading is skewed to the optimistic side, but from a strictly hardware point of view, brain-equivalence in 10-15 years fits with a lot of the projections I've read from other people. Maybe just the right combination of neural net simulations will be enough to get useful results, if we can simulate the types of neurons in each brain region effectively. We'd have to "teach" it with appropriate input, of course.
Or maybe, since functional models of the various brain regions are slowly but surely progressing too, we won't necessarily need to use neural simulations for all of it, but instead combine some neural models with some more functional (& more efficient) software, for a hybrid approach.
In any case, I don't think this guy is necessarily arguing that we'll have strong AI or artificial consciousness in 10 years, regardless of how the press spin it, more just that we'll have the hardware to simulate the brain by then. When we actually get strong AI depends more on how "emergent" consciousness turns out to be, or at worst when we can figure out functional models for enough of the brain to be sufficient -which could take a lot longer, or not (see: genome project).
In either case, since you claim a closer association to the field than I, I would welcome some informed links to enlighten me further.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Everything we would like to see eg. artificial brain, jet pack, et al, is always 10 years away.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Maybe Prof. Dr. Hugo de Garis's predictions (PDF) are finally starting to come true.
Exactly what do we *not* know about the human brain? We know it takes input, models the world, and makes a prediction based on that model. We know that intelligence arises from the ability to make that prediction. What else is left??? I think people are simply scared to admit that this may be all that our brains are actually doing. Technology will not stop for people that want to stay in the past. It is going to keep on moving, whether we want it to or not.
Btw, it's not going to be 10 years. It'll be more like 5 years if I have anything to do about it.
I'm not sure what to link to; there isn't a whole lot written about modeling the human brain at that scale and level of detail. Questions of the type "In field X is it possible to do Y?" generally require a large amount of knowledge about field X.
That said, one can--if one is at a university with appropriate access--browse journals like Neural Computation to see the gap between what people do now (even in those few papers that are most on-target) and what the goal is.
Heck, we can't even agree on what the classes of neurons are on in the cortex. (Try googling "inhibitory neuron class cortex" and note that instead of finding handy tables of the interneuron classes, you find things that sound like, "Golly, we just found three more!")