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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?
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:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
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.