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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."
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?
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!
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:
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Cancer cures have been pretty underwhelming; but 5 and 10 year survival rates for many flavors of cancer have been heading steadily in the right direction. The efficacy of pain control, anti-emetics, and other ancillary stuff has seen some improvement as well(unsexy; but not puking your guts up, as much, during treatment is definitely worth something). Also, there has been some interesting work in cancer prevention which is even better. The HPV vaccines, for instance, show a great deal of promise in preventing a substantial percentage of cervical, anal, and penile cancers, while reductions in smoking should reduce lung cancer incidence rather nicely.
Talk is generally PR hype; but sometimes the PR department is attached to people who do real work.
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.
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.
Personally, I have a problem killing animals too, I've never understood the generally accepted insanity that includes both the fluffybunnywunny and the rabbit pie.
I guess it's somewhere around empathy. If we can emotionally relate to the intelligence it's a horrendous crime, if we can picture the deceased as an aggressor, or sufficiently different to ourselves then it's somewhere between nothing and a victory.
Current electronics do nothing to stimulate a feeling of empathy, they're tools, extensions of ourselves. Once a machine brain can talk and reason with you, you might just feel different ?
You have to see it from an evolutionist point of view. The reason why we feel pain, is because it keeps us away from dangerous things. The reason why we don't mind killing pigs is because we have to eat something. The reason why we don't kill each other is because that wouldn't be very healthy for the survival of the race. The reason there is love is because it makes producing babies easier. And so on, we are what we are because it is good for survival and most of our core morals build up on that.
The fun part of course is that little of those morals still work when it comes to computers. Death for example becomes kind of a non-issue when you can copy, suspend and resume a program. Death on the other side is a big deal with biologic things, because you can't copy them. The death of a biologic thing is pretty final, the death of a computer program is not.
I don't really doubt that we one day will be able to build a computer capable of human-like intelligence, but when we do that, our moral system will have a really hard time to keep up with reality, as its not build around logic, but for most part just on our survival instincts.
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
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.
The comment isn't old, it's appropriate. 50+ years ago, we were promised flying cars. We were all going to have them. We were going to have them 10 years ago. We don't. 10 years from now, I rather doubt we'll have flying cars OR artificial human brains. It's the standard estimation flub that researchers make in order to secure funding.
Dude in case you ain't heard they sealed that hole so unless you only want movies from last year on your media server you're kinda boned. Funny thing is that there are plenty of torrents for even the latest movies! Which once again proves that all the *.A.As are good as is making piracy the better option.
I mean here it is, the first decade of the 21st century, and fucking huge HDDs that were only a dream when I first got into computing are commonplace and quite cheap for any and all to own, and yet I'm supposed to keep feeding movies and games into my drives like I have a PS2? W.T.F? What is the point of having all this fricking space if we can't fill it with our movies and our games and have instant access? But of course the pirate versions don't have that limitation, and also work on my 64bit OS, which means I have to fricking crack every damned game I buy because their shitty DRM garbage don't work. Which is why I'm sticking to DVDs. I can buy DVD movies cheap, and it is trivial to rip them to my 500Gb HDD in DivX 5 so I can have them on demand. It just proves that the *.A.As just want to live like it is 1995, instead of getting with the 21st century.
So don't support Sony and the *.A.As, buy your games in the bargain bins and let BD rot on the vine. When they lose enough cash and all their screams of "piracy" don't do squat they'll have to wake up and smell reality and give the people what they want. But by supporting Blu Ray you are telling Sony "Yes, please bone me with ever nastier DRM and constant firmware updates which can make older players obsolete. I like that a lot!". the only way to win in this case is not to play the game.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.