Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip?

destinyland writes "Can we imprint the circuitry of the human brain onto a silicon chip? It requires a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops — a thousand trillion floating point operations per second — but a team of European scientists has already simulated 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections. And their brain-chip is scaleable, with plans to create a superchip mimicking 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses. Unfortunately, the human brain has 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses. Just remember Ray Kurzweil's argument: once a machine can achieve a human level of intelligence — it can also exceed it."

Comments

There. Fixed that for you.

[denzacar]

"Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip?"

Not YET.

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[eldavojohn]

I agree 100%. I still don't understand why this charlatan ...

Well, despite my overly critical initial post I will waste karma with further speculation on Kurzweil. He's actually not a charlatan. He's just stepping outside of his field and extrapolating out some of the things that have been achieved ... and using some unrealistic exponential curve to guide his predictions.

The man has experience great success -- both in business and academia -- throughout his lifetime. But past 1990 he's made a few inventions to help learning and disabled students. Which is great. Unfortunately he's found that writing books, holding symposiums and giving speeches about fantastic science fiction is what draws attention and resources. So he keeps doing it. It results in a lot press and I'm sure his aging body might drive him to hope and fund a singularity before he dies.

While this singularity is a romantic idea, it's just not based on science. He's lost sight of what he once did musical hardware that advanced synthetic music far beyond the rate at which it normally would have run. And now his efforts are not designated to realistic goals but instead loftier goals that no one can achieve. What's worse is that it depends on crosses between fields he's simply not an expert in.

You might be able to argue that he's a charlatan now but in my mind he's Thomas Edison turned Nostradamus. He's pulled out all the stops that relegate normal scientists to the scientific process and has passed optimism onto fantastical dreams. He can write all the books he wants but until he gets back to what made him great -- actually implementing something and leaving a legacy of working examples -- he runs of the risk of tarnishing his reputation.