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

Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[eldavojohn]

Just remember Ray Kurzweil's argument: once a machine can achieve a human level of intelligence â" it can also exceed it.

Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant computer scientist and brought us many improvements -- maybe even the invention of -- the electronic musical keyboard.

But that is not his argument. I laughed when I read that as the concept was presented to me in sci-fi novels before Kurzweil's time. The earliest I (or Wikipedia) can trace the intelligence explosion theory back to is Irving John Good who, in 1965, said:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

This was popularized by Vernor Vinge which is where I recalled reading about it. There are many reasons to celebrate Raymond Kurzweil. In my opinion, his is "work" in nutrition and his near-religion called futurology are not in those reasons. He has become a vocal proponent of a dream to become god-like. I do not share that dream and I wish him the best of luck in his endeavors. I just cringe every time I read of the "singularity being near" or the ability to live forever coming about. If it's going to happen, just sit back and let it happen. I feel he has done a great disservice to the field of artificial intelligence by promising unrealistic things in interviews to the lay person. Disappointment is a sure fire way to get yourself branded as a snake oil salesman religious nut.

Predictions for the future are for sci-fi books and movies, don't get into the habit of being a scientist in an interview with a reputable magazine or web site telling them what is about to happen. Example:

Kurzweil projects that between now and 2050 technology will become so advanced that medical advances will allow people to radically extend their lifespans while preserving and even improving quality of life as they age. The aging process could at first be slowed, then halted, and then reversed as newer and better medical technologies became available. Kurzweil argues that much of this will be a fruit of advances in medical nanotechnology, which will allow microscopic machines to travel through one's body and repair all types of damage at the cellular level.

And that's easily criticized:

Biologist P.Z. Myers has criticized Kurzweil's predictions as being based on "New Age spiritualism" rather than science and says that Kurzweil does not understand basic biology. Myers also claims that Kurzweil picks and chooses events that appear to demonstrate his claim of exponential technological increase leading up to a singularity, and ignores events that do not.

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[divisionbyzero]

++

I agree 100%. I still don't understand why this charlatan gets so much press on Slashdot. Probably because it causes people like you and I to post.

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[cpu_fusion]

I feel he has done a great disservice to the field of artificial intelligence by promising unrealistic things in interviews to the lay person. Disappointment is a sure fire way to get yourself branded as a snake oil salesman religious nut.

A disappointed public threatens research funding, but an unprepared public threatens chaos.

I'm more concerned with making sure we're thinking ahead to the radical change that is likely to come, be it in 10 years or 40, than to be concerned that lay people will distrust AI researchers.

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.

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[SmurfButcher Bob]

In fact, implementation would be trivial.

10 PRINT "What?"
20 PRINT "I don't understand"
30 PRINT "Where's the tea?"
40 GOTO 10

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[seven of five]

Ray Kurzweil is a brilliant computer scientist and brought us many improvements -- maybe even the invention of -- the electronic musical keyboard.

err... no. Electronic keyboards go back at least this far...Ondes Martenot

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[mcgrew]

From TFA: imprint the circuitry of the human brain using transistors on a silicon chip?

No, not on binary circuits we can't. We might simulate the brain, or even model the brain, but we won't imprint it.

The brain is a parallel processor.

Tremendously paralell; and it's a multimode analog design, not a single mode digital design. There are many different kinds of brain cells, with both chemical and electrical components.

We can model an atomic explosion, but we understand the physics behind an atomic explosion. We have hardly begun to understand how the brain works. We'll have cures for all mental ilnesses before we can accurately model the brain, because if you can't fix a broken machine you don't understand how it works, and even sometimes if you can fix a broken machine you still may not understand that machine completely.

When you model an atomic explosion, there is no radiation released. A model is not the real thing.

There is no test for sentience. Without such a test it would be impossible to kow if you have succeeded in accurately modeling it.

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[Anonymous Coward]

"Irving John Good who, in 1965," ... and ... "charlatan"

Stanislaw Ulam a Polish mathematician who knew John von Neumann (who died in 1957) told of a conversation he had with John von Neumann, about accelerating change, stating:
"One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue."

Further to this, the concepts of even the Von Neumann probes are also based on accelerating spread of self-replicating machines, so its very evident John von Neumann was already thinking along these lines decades before most other people.

Raymond Kurzweil is indeed a brilliant computer scientist, but its very sad John von Neumann's ideas are so often overlooked, as he died decades ago whereas Raymond Kurzweil is still able to keep self promoting himself at every press event, gaining ever more credit for concepts he never originated.

What makes John von Neumann's achievement even more amazing, (I find almost mind blowing) is that technology was so primitive in his time, yet he showed he had the amazingly insightful capacity to imagine technology far beyond even our level of technology. I still find that jaw dropping. How could he imagine it decades before others, its so awe inspiring. He really does deserve being called a genius. I wish there was far more recognition of his work. We really should be building statues of him to inspire future generations of scientists.

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[Jorgandar]

I find the arguement puzzling that we would only have to design a machine that's "smarter" (however that's defined...) than a human. Then the machine could design still smarter machines, etc, etc, until you get an intilligence explosion.

While that sounds plausable we have to remember that not a SINGLE person designed the machine. It was the work of hundreds or perhaps thousands of people, over time, designing and improving the individual components and software. No one person could have done such a feat on their own. My arguement in this case is that the machine would have to be smarter not than a single person, but than an entire group of people, all with different expertise and internal creative processes, combined, to result in an intilligence explosion. That's a very different conclusion.

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[Lord Bitman]

yeah, they'll never make a computer that can solve problems the way a human can until they get computers to become absolutely focused- if I tell it to run i++ a quadrillion times, I want to see an answer! I don't want to come back five minutes later and see that it's decided to play solitaire instead!

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[LateArthurDent]

In fact, implementation would be trivial.

10 PRINT "What?" 20 PRINT "I don't understand" 30 PRINT "Where's the tea?" 40 GOTO 10

What?

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil

[Wandering Idiot]

No matter in how much detail you examine the hardware of a computer, you can tell nothing about it until you turn it on, that is until it becomes alive so to speak. The basic performance characteristics of a computer are not determined by hardware, but by software. Software is not subject to the usual laws of physics, such for example gravity. Because software is not a material object, it can be transmitted at the speed of light and can be endlessly copied. Even if computer hardware could be made as complex as the human brain, it would still have to be programmed.

You're being silly. Stop being silly. If you examine the hard drive platters of a computer in the correct way, you can indeed see the encoding of the software. If you similarly studied the rest of the hardware in enough detail, you would be able to understand how the software interacts with the hardware (assuming you're able to grasp that the PC is supposed to be hooked to a power source). This would be difficult, but is indeed possible, and similar things have been done in real-world reverse engineering.

In the same way, I see no reason in principle that the brain can't by understood completely by a fine-grained enough understanding of all its physical components and how they interact. Which is easier said than done, given the complexity of the brain, but we're talking general principles here.

"Software", and "information" are useful abstract grouping concepts, but that doesn't make them magic. Information has to have some representation in the physical world (whether it be in the neural patterns of a human, a stone tablet, etc) otherwise it can't be said to exist.


The Bible characterizes a person as being essentially a living spirit or soul, living in a physical body. It tells us that someday, after we die physically, the software of the soul will be loaded into a new more capable body which lives forever.

Interestingly, you have something in common with proponents of strong AI and mind uploading in this, in that you consider the mind and consciousness to be information, and hence transferrable to substrates other than the original body. The difference being that they don't posit a substrate "outside of the physical world", which is almost literally a meaningless phrase unless you can describe it more fully.


We have to take all this on faith at the present time

Who's this "we" you speak of? Not to put too fine a point on it, but some of us like having actual reasons for the things we think, which is pretty much the exact opposite of faith. (Although in practice, people who take things on faith generally do have reasons for their beliefs, just not very good ones from the point of view of rationality [i.e. "believing X makes me feel better about the universe, whether or not it's true"] )

Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip?"
  No.

Re:Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip?

[4D6963]

Stop crushing our scifi nerd pipe dreams, you bastard!

Interesting, but...

[bennomatic]

Something like this will be possible one day, but my layperson's understanding of how the brain works is fundamentally different from how computers work. The hard-wired CPU/RAM model is just not a perfect parallel, so while we can and will improve on machines that learn, it's going to be different from the wetware that is constantly growing, changing, forming new connections and interacting with internal, external and imagined stimuli.

Re:Interesting, but...

[quadrox]

While the CPU/RAM model is not the way the brain works (I suppose), but it can be used to run a "virtual machine" that itself does work like the human brain does.

I don't think they are trying to simulate a human brain just by throwing a bunch of hardware together...

Re:Interesting, but...

[jonbryce]

Why should we try to create an artificial brain in the computing lab when it would be much easier to do it in the genetic engineering lab?

Re:Interesting, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Running the human brain in a virtual machine creates lots of overhead.

Re:Interesting, but...

[Whorhay]

We may not be able to build a chip that it's self perfectly mimicks the human brain. But we can very likely build a chip that can process the software necessary to simulate the brain. Think of it as a programming problem where you have object classes for each major type of cell in the brain. You then have to keep track of which ones are connected to which others at any one time. The real difficulty will be in allowing the individual cells to change their behavior over time and depending on the stimulus they have individually recieved. Otherwise the brain simulation would not be capable of learning and growing, but would instead be stuck at whatever development stage it was created at.

Re:Interesting, but...

[Hatta]

Something like this will be possible one day, but my layperson's understanding of how the brain works is fundamentally different from how computers work.

According to Turing, all sufficiently complicated computing devices are equivalent. The architecture may be entirely different, but there's no reason in principle one cannot be simulated on the other.

At the very least, we know the brain obeys the laws of physics. A computer can simulate the laws of physics. Therefore, a computer can simulate the brain.

Re:Interesting, but...

[sabernet]

The former doesn't start smelling funny when you leave it on the lab counter overnight.

Re:Interesting, but...

[eldavojohn]

According to Turing, all sufficiently complicated computing devices are equivalent ...

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that was said of binary systems? Can you prove to me that the lowest form of information in the brain is the bit? Are neurons only 'on or off'? Is it just discharge or not discharge? I am no neurologist but I believe that small non-binary charges can be held by neurons that may influence thought. Neurons are fairly complex cells that have many complex dendrites -- some being multipolar instead of bipolar.

At the very least, we know the brain obeys the laws of physics.

Unfortunately we have a very incomplete set of laws for physics.

This may shock you but I assure you that there are things going on in the human brain that no physicist, biologist or biophysicist can explain. Hell, we can't even draw a definite line between what is chemical/physical and what is purely neurological function. There may not even be a line to draw. Although we are making advances, we are still in the dark about a lot of basic things in the human mind let alone discovering the detailed inner workings of the thing we call 'consciousness.' Can you tell me why it is that enlarged regions of our brain make us so much more 'intelligent' than mice or whales?

I hope for a huge breakthrough but it is nothing more than childish hope. My gut feeling is that we are much much farther from the 'intelligence explosion' than the futurologists think.

Re:Interesting, but...

[hoggoth]

But what if the brain works by exploiting all of the effects of molecules, proteins, ions, electrical charges, even quantum effects at a molecular level? We have seen that evolution is excellent at finding very clever ways of exploiting whatever resources are available. It is possible that the only way to simulate a brain is to simulate every single atom involved within a brain. For obvious reasons a computer made of 'n' atoms cannot simulate a brain made of 'n' atoms as fast as that brain can work.

I don't know that this is true, but it certainly brings up the possibility that it may be impossible to simulate a brain faster than a brain works, or better than a brain.

Or on a slightly less pessimistic level, perhaps a "synapse" could be encapsulated in a software object, but the number of variables that make each synapse's position, arrangement, and connections unique are staggering and would require a machine to be thousands of times more powerful than a real brain in order to simulate it. That would move our "singularity" out til we have computers that can process as much as 22,000 billion neurons and 220,000 trillion synapses. I wonder if someone better at math and physics could calculate the bare minimum energy required for the negative-entropy to store 220,000 trillion somewhat complex pieces of information. I recall reading a calculation that the ZFS filesystem has the theoretical (but not practical) limit of enough information that the minimum energy required to actual encode that information would be enough to boil the Earth.

Re:Interesting, but...

[robot_love]

Emulating brain on x86 - ?

Priceless?

Re:Interesting, but...

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Well, it's not being done that way. The idea behind what the Europeans are doing is to simulate actual neuronal behavior. The results were quite interesting in that it seems to behave much like a real piece of neural tissue (http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/19767/).

Re:Interesting, but...

[dalhamir]

I am a neuroscientist and I can tell you for sure that the basic form of the information in a brain is not a linear bit. But it does obey the laws of physics, and everything we know points to it following pretty mundane physics. The whole 'quantum state' theory of consciousness is pretty weak and unable to explain a lot of really basic phenomenon of the brain.

However, the real trick of human intelligence is not simply the number of neurons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons but rather the particular pattern of the network which allows us to detect and manipulate extremely complex patterns which a significant amount of noise. I think we will get to the point one day where we can replicate a human level intelligence, but getting 20 billion things into a organized pattern is just that start of that process.

And, even then, we don't need to worry about an 'intelligence explosion' because a) there are probably some pretty hard laws on the relationship between size and complexity, which is almost certainly non-linear and b) the knowledge needed to create this human level intelligence won't be understandable to any single human. It has already take teams of people working together for combined millions of man hours to get to where we are today. Even if this computer we make was capable of thinking at the level of 2x human, it will take many machines a long time before progressing to the next level of understanding of a complex non-linear phenomenon such as intelligence.

Re:Interesting, but...

[Hatta]

I see no reason to believe we have "free will". As far as I can tell, whether we have free will or not is irrelevant to anything important. We have "will", and that is sufficient.

Re:Interesting, but...

[mcmonkey]

Emulating brain on x86 - ?

Priceless?

Profit!

Re:Interesting, but...

[Red Flayer]

For obvious reasons a computer made of 'n' atoms cannot simulate a brain made of 'n' atoms as fast as that brain can work

First... there is no requirement that the computer cannot be some x*n atoms.

Second... I'm not sure that this would be the case:

It is possible that the only way to simulate a brain is to simulate every single atom involved within a brain.

It's quite possible that, say, only 1% of the atoms in the brain are required for the brain activity we'd like to simulate. Off the top of my head (ha!) some examples would be those atoms involved in nutrient uptake, metabolism, and waste removal. I'm sure there're also atoms like those that give length to axons... those don't need 1:1 representation, a timed loop could represent them. Or all the neurotransmitters, those atoms could be instead represented by a few bits used as a counter.

Basically, my argument boils down to this: I don't think the goal would be to build a simulacrum of the brain. Just a simulation of the brain. This gives lots of room for making things more efficient (though maintaining accuracy would, of course, be necessary).

Re:Interesting, but...

[uberjoe]

Creating an actual human brain with all the support equipment necessary is pretty easy in the bedroom too.

Re:Interesting, but...

[mcgrew]

The former doesn't start smelling funny when you leave it on the lab counter overnight.

"My dog doesn't smell!"

"You gave him a bath?"

"No, I cut off his nose!"

Re:Interesting, but...

[ferespo]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that was said of binary systems?

It applies to any kind of computation, using binary or decimal or any representation system.

In fact we are talking about the Church-Turing thesis here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_thesis/

The Church-Turing thesis has been alleged to have some profound implications for the philosophy of mind.[37] There are also some important open questions which cover the relationship between the Church-Turing thesis and physics, and the possibility of hypercomputation. When applied to physics, the thesis has several possible meanings:
1. The universe is equivalent to a Turing machine; thus, computing non-recursive functions is physically impossible. This has also been termed the strong Church-Turing thesis (not to be confused with the previously mentioned SCTT) and is a foundation of digital physics.
2. The universe is not equivalent to a Turing machine (i.e., the laws of physics are not Turing-computable), but incomputable physical events are not "harnessable" for the construction of a hypercomputer. For example, a universe in which physics involves real numbers, as opposed to computable reals, might fall into this category.
3. The universe is a hypercomputer, and it is possible to build physical devices to harness this property and calculate non-recursive functions. For example, it is an open question whether all quantum mechanical events are Turing-computable, although it is known that rigorous models such as quantum Turing machines are equivalent to deterministic Turing machines. (They are not necessarily efficiently equivalent; see above.) John Lucas and, more famously, Roger Penrose[38] have suggested that the human mind might be the result of some kind of quantum-mechanically enhanced, "non-algorithmic" computation, although there is no scientific evidence for this proposal.

There are many other technical possibilities which fall outside or between these three categories, but these serve to illustrate the range of the concept.

Re:Interesting, but...

[mcgrew]

Neurons are fairly complex cells that have many complex dendrites -- some being multipolar instead of bipolar.

So our binary computing brain simulator would have Manic Depression?

On a more serious note, you're right; we don't even know what sentience is. Maybe water is sentient; we are, after all, something like 70% water.

To misquote Chief Dan George's character in Little Big Man (because it's from memory and I haven't seen that movie in a while), "The Human Being [people of his tribe] think everything is alive. The people, the buffalo, the trees, even the rocks. But the white man thinks nothing is alive, and if he suspects something is alive he'll kill it."

Re:Interesting, but...

[jonbryce]

But can a brain be emulated in computer hardware? I don't think it can. Certainly not with existing technology, and I don't think we are any closer to it now than we were in the 1970s.

The two main problems I see are that computers only understand boolean logic, and they only do what they are told to do. No matter how fast you make them, or how much memory you throw at them, you can't get round that without taking the technology in a completely different direction, and that just isn't happening at the moment.

Obviously I'm not going to say that this will never happen. Such a statement can only ever be proved wrong, but I do think the biology lab is most likely place for a synthetic brain.

Easy!

[Anonymous Coward]

All you have to do is pick the right person and you can greatly reduce the number of neurons you'll need to model.

How about the converse

[Locke2005]

I'm more interested in whether or not we can build a microchip into a human brain. At least then I might be able to remember my wife's anniversary...

Re:How about the converse

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm more interested in whether or not we can build a microchip into a human brain. At least then I might be able to remember my wife's anniversary...

You could try remembering your anniversary instead. :-)

Re:How about the converse

[maxume]

If there was only some other way that you could store information in a mechanical system for (perhaps automatic) retrieval and display at a later date.

There. Fixed that for you.

[denzacar]

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

Not YET.

Re:There. Fixed that for you.

[FlyingBishop]

God gave us the capacity to create life. That's pretty evident. There's nothing in the Bible to suggest that we are restricted to standard procreation.

God really doesn't address anything beyond the human, and until we're handed a set of instructions on the subject, I will continue to strive to create better and less evil intelligence. If that proves not to be human... then that's what it takes.

Re:There. Fixed that for you.

[Xaedalus]

Assuming I survive the nuke, it would be rather interesting to have a Cylon jock poop on my face. Will it be carbon-based poop, or silicone-based poop? And if it's silicone-based... will it smell bad and be soft? Or will I be hit with the equivalent of a brick to the face? And will it look like Tricia Helfer, or will it be your standard tin-clad Cylon jock-trooper taking a squat over my face?

Re:There. Fixed that for you.

[digitig]

If you gradually increase the lightness of black, at what point does it become white?

The fact that there is no clear boundary does not mean that there is not a useful distinction -- the ancients spotted that logical fallacy: the continuum fallacy

.

Re:There. Fixed that for you.

[truckaxle]

This got me wondering if silicon based females have carbon implants.

Quality of simulation

[Tacvek]

Even if we have a chip capable of simulating the same number of neurons and synapses as the human brain, that will not magically form an artificial life-form. I know little about simulated neural networks, but I do know that they are only a very rough approximation of the workings of the human brain. We still don't understand all the intricacies of the neural and chemical interactions that occur to a sufficient level to properly simulate all of them.

Re:Quality of simulation

[ausekilis]

As one of my professors once said: "How do we go from billions of neural synapses to midget wrestling?" While amusing, it points out one of our great unknowns. Biologists and neuroscientists (some psychologists) understand things at the synapse level, and how the chained firing happens in neurons. Then psychologists understand normal behavior by examining abnormal behavior, but that's at a much higher level. We simply don't know how to map out what's in between.

Sure we can...

[thisnamestoolong]

...but why would we? The brain was assembled by natural selection -- a process that can only improve and work with what it already has, which is hardly ideal. The human brain is certainly amazing, but it is not perfect. There are certainly better, faster, and more efficient ways of designing the superhuman AIs of the future. Looking at the brain will give us a good road map, but is not the end-all be-all.

I see a strange arrogance and egocentricity in trying to design robots to be exactly like us, why not think outside the box? Why are upright, bipedal robots always portrayed as the ultimate? There are most certainly more efficient and better designs than the one we are saddled with, this is just how we happened to evolve, we are simply the current end of one branch of the evolutionary tree.

Re:Sure we can...

[ardor]

The way we evolved can be a hint about efficiency. For example, bipedal movement turned out to be pretty efficient on a human scale, while eight legs like a spider are not. Therefore, it is important to know *why* things evolved the way they did. Was it because of energy efficiency? Adaptation to local predators? etc.

Re:Sure we can...

[Extremus]

Mode parent up! Do not seems reasonable to consider the "conscience" as a phenomena inherent to the biological brain. In fact - and this is somewhat ironic -, the most successful intelligent systems are based in cognitivist approaches, which are a little bit far away from the conexionist approach. While I do not believe that this situation will last much longer (given the difficulties in programming symbolic reasoning systems), I do not also believe that the brain simulation approach is the only way to go, or even the most efficient way to go.

Exceeding

[Usually Unlucky]

Instead of recreating a human brain why don't they figure out how to wire a processor into the human brain to improve it.

I could use a built in graphing calculator or spell check.

One word

[therpham]

Cylons!

It's not just the parallelism

[imgod2u]

It's the reconfigurable nature of the human brain that's unique and powerful. If all you did was take one person, listed all of the skills of that person -- all of the things he knew; all of the skills in smell, touch, sight and taste; all of the cognitive reasoning ability -- then you could create a chip to simulate those skills. Algorithms for image recognition, feature extraction, speech recognition, etc. are all available that are very very close to what humans can do.

But the thing that separates humans is that it didn't take hundreds of years of mathematical development to come up with these algorithms. The human brain develops these algorithms through changes in its structure from birth. At about age 10, speech recognition specialized and tailored to the dialect, language and tones that the person hears has developed on its own.

That type of structural formation and learning is what would need to happen in silicon to make a truly intelligent machine. Neuron clusters emulated using transistors would need to be able to dynamically form connections to other neuron clusters. There'd have to be some type of distributed learning algorithm encoded in the operation of each individual neuron.

Speech recognition is easy. Image recognition is easy. Developing a distributed, scalable, self-modifying architecture that can learn all of those and more on its own with nothing more than training samples is the difficult part.

Re:Why?

[denzacar]

How many of those can work 24/7/365 on a single subject with 100% concentration?

Or how about how many of those can you scale down to fit into a shoebox or smaller (while they are till operative) or scale up by linking them in a cluster (preferably of the Beowulf kind)?

Not the whole brain...less is more

[GNUCyberKat]

Quote from article:

"It takes about 20 transistors to implement a synapse. Clearly, building the silicon equivalent of 220 trillion synapses is not an easy problem to solve."

-- That's nice if you want to model the entire brain but why would you? How much of the brain is geared toward bodily functions that one would not necessarily need to model? If you exclude the required synapses dedicated to those functions you can focus on a smaller subset that would be easier to build and operate...no?

Another thought is when building a brain model...who's? Not all brains are built equal...almost every brain related health story I read online speaks of neurological issues in the brain...what are the odds of building these into any model of a brain? It can get expensive correcting the circuitry to improve and correct these? Which leads me to wonder...what does a flawless brain look like exactly?

Re:Not the whole brain...less is more

[MarkvW]

The parts of the brain "geared toward bodily functions" is crucial to the functioning to the brain as a whole. The brain interaction with genitalia is just one example.

Your post brings up another good point though: Before the brain is thorougly constructed, the input streams into the brain need to be thoroughly understood as well.

And, where does the brain stop? The spinal column? The nervous system? Hormones?

This is so cool!

with DRM

[DaveSlash]

to erase everything you read when the license expires

Re:Intersting tidbit

[dzfoo]

Do you mean that, while in the process of simulating human intellect, the simulator itself becomes self-aware? Then what if the simulacrum becomes aware of the simulator? Would it create a metaphysical singularity, or just blow the stack?

Inquiring minds want to know.

        -dZ.

From the article

[phantomfive]

Hawkins believes computer scientists have focused too much on the end product of artificial intelligence. Like B.F. Skinner, who held that psychologists should study stimuli and responses and essentially ignore the cognitive processes that go on in the brain, he holds that scientists working in AI and neural networks have focused too much on inputs and outputs rather than the neurological system that connects them.

I agree with this quote. A lot of computer scientists try to build artificial intelligence without really understanding how their own brain works. It is really too bad because they have an unusually observable specimen right in their own head. Genetic learning? Is that how you feel you learn personally? Of course this question can't answer everything about artificial intelligence, but it can definitely help and is too often ignored.

Also, one thing that isn't clear from the article is whether the synapses will be static, or whether they can move and grow, just as human brain synapses can.

Re:Do they need to map the entire brain

[Hungus]

Lots of "things" are said and lots of things are wrong. "people only use 10% of their actual brain power" is belongs to both groups.

Though an alluring idea, the "10 percent myth" is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although there's no definitive culprit to pin the blame on for starting this legend, the notion has been linked to the American psychologist and author William James, who argued in The Energies of Men that "We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources." It's also been associated with to Albert Einstein, who supposedly used it to explain his cosmic towering intellect.

source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=people-only-use-10-percent-of-brain

Interesting question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you work in management?

Re:I hope this technology comes to fruition

[Whorhay]

That's why I'd like to see it implemented in such a way that once my wet brain starts to deteriorate and lose functionality those processes would be picked up by the chip. Eventually all the brain bunctions would be handled by the chip but there hopefully wouldn't be any defining point in time where there would be two copies of me functioning at the same time. This would likely allow me to gradually become a cyborg and be unaware of no longer being me.

already done

[blackfrancis75]

Hi, BrainChip here - just logging on to let you know I do exist. Cheers, - BrainChip.

Re:It's your birthday...

[AP31R0N]

If they look like Sean Young, i welcome them too.

Re:I hope this technology comes to fruition

[TooMuchToDo]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's paradox, is a paradox that raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object.

Complexity orders of magnitude bigger

[microbox]

Biologist P.Z. Myers has criticized Kurzweil's predictions as being based on "New Age spiritualism" rather than science and says that Kurzweil does not understand basic biology.

Having some personal understanding of both, I heartily agree. Lets separate out wishful thinking and esoteric "knowing" - both are merely ungrounded speculation.

Myers also claims that Kurzweil picks and chooses events that appear to demonstrate his claim of exponential technological increase leading up to a singularity, and ignores events that do not.

I once seriously considered a strategy for building and artificial brain with a veteran professor of computer science. Examining the problem I gave up when I realised that the individual cells are "intelligent". I think this is vitally important How does the "mind" of a protozoa work? They can navigate obstacles, identify and assimilate food, run away from danger, and have a 20 minute memory. We can assume that a single neurone may well have all of these capabilities and more. I believe that we may be myopically focused on nodes and connections, without considering just how complex and capable a single node is.

So the complexity of the problem is probably an order of magnitude beyond 22 billion neurones and 220 trillion connections. Then consider the effect of 1000s of unknown neurotransmitters - and we know little about the "known" ones, such as serotonin and dopamine, except that they have a profound effect. And _then_, consider that the brain has structure, and we know comparatively little about that structure, and only a few hints about the algorithms and data structures that it uses.

Re:Complexity orders of magnitude bigger

[Cyberax]

Protozoa are simple, they just have a number of triggers with some memory. It can be hard to determine all of them but once you're done, it should be simple to simulate them.

And neurons are studied quite well enough. So far we don't see any 'superintelligent' behavior from simple neurons. There are subtle things that we might have missed (like recently discovered neurotransmitter spillover), but are they essential?

Personally, I think that we might be able to simulate brain. It will probably require several more breakthroughs, but I'd bet it will be possible.

Educated guess : No

[Iffie]

As a former neuroscientist I would say NO. The brain is not build out of static elements, they themselves show dna/rna expression variation due to their own activities and neuromodulation. A fixed system can doe certain processing, but it has to be reconfigurable and have some software oversight to be as flexible as out brains..

Just think

[Linker3000]

Just think what might happen if Apple got the patent on these suckers and brought them to market as the personal implant - the IThink?

Imagine waking up morning and Ithinking "I'd like to fall in love today", so you make a mental link to the App Store and download "Love" for £1.95. On your way to work, you spot someone that takes your fancy, so you make a quick connection and download Flirt for a further £2. Things go well: Entertain £2, ShowYouCare £3.30, Intimate £10. A while passes and you're happily married (or have both downloaded LiveInSin-Noshame), so Broody is added to the bill.

What a wonderful life..well, if you download 'Harmony'

Randomness

[Burnhard]

It requires a computational capacity of 36.8 petaflops -- a thousand trillion floating point operations per second

It requires far more than that. According to some, the microtubules on the cytoskeletons of the cells themselves can be processing units. Raise the bar a few orders of magnitude in that case.

Re:I hope this technology comes to fruition

[networkBoy]

but will you want to scream and be unable to do so?

Also would you really want to be Borg? Not only will your brain deteriorate, but your body will as well. I've given some real thought to how the Borg likely started and this sums it up really. They added the ability to communicate with a central computer and each other electronically (it's faster afterall), and next thing you know the hive mind was born. /. even shows that hive mentality is possible in humans, this would simply enshrine it.

Mind you, so long as I was one of the first units produced I'm not sure I would mind it much. I think the initial cadre would be individuals for the most part (after the babbling idiots first produced when things go wrong and the bugs are worked out).
-nB

Nanotech

[seven of five]

Back in the mid-80s, Drexler's Engines of Creation had some things to say about reverse-engineered brains. From what I remember, a specialized nanomechanical processor could emulate a neuron in a fraction of the volume. The functioning of a human brain could be done in a package about a cm^3. The main concern was thermodynamics--how fast you could run the thing before heat became too much of a problem.

Turing machines may be equivalent, but ..

[roguegramma]

Turing machines may be equivalent, but their efficiency at various tasks isn't.

I think it would be a very interesting task that would increase the understanding of NP-complex problems (including simulations of turing machines on other turing machines) to see the efficiency cost graph.

Not even close

[joeyblades]

BTW, current estimates are more like 100 billion neurons and upwards of 300-500 trillion synaptic connections.

However, numbers aside, the human brain is not merely a complex collection of neurons and interconnected synapses. Complexity is only one very basic factor, another, more critical, factor is organization. We don't even know where to start in the organization of these artificial neural networks to emulate a human brain.

WARNING! COMPUTER ANALOGY: It's not the number and density of interconnected transistors that make a Xeon, it's the organization.

Re:"thousand trillion"?

[ShadowRangerRIT]

It's worse than that. The term for large numbers above 999,999,999 differs depending on which scale you've learned. Using a thousand trillion is a term that is only correct in the long scale, but I'm fairly sure they meant the short scale trillion times 1000 (aka quadrillion), as long scale thousand trillion is equivalent to a sextillion in the short scale, and we're not that complex.

human?

[ZenDragon]

Neurons and Synapses all all that do not make a "person." There is much more to human intelligence that I do not believe a machine could ever achieve. That is certainly not to say that we wouldnt be able to "grow" a machine with the personality of a human. In other words a human brain interfaced to a machine. The very fact that humans think as they do implies that it would be possible, but I do not believe man understands enough about their own nature, nor will we ever understand enough to actually re-create our minds in a machine from scratch.

Re:Undue Credit to Kurzweil (PS)

[mcgrew]

A disappointed public threatens research funding, but an unprepared public threatens chaos

And a simulated intelligence that doesn't truly think or feel may get "machine rights". I wish these guys would read Dune; the jihad was was not against the thinking machines, but against the men who used the thinking machines to enslave their fellow men.

And, when they can model a fly's brain and build an artificial fly, I'll be a hell of a lot more impresses than their simply "modeling" 200k out of BILLIONS of brain cells. Build a fly's brain that can control a real fly's functions and I might start to believe you.

Re:Do they need to map the entire brain

[The_mad_linguist]

There are people who use 100% of their neurons simultaneously on a daily basis.

We call them epileptics.

I don't recall the paper but

[bussdriver]

Around 2012 the tech will exist to map the whole human brain; not a living one, just the resolution needed to get all the cells and connections-- maybe 2015... and it'll probably have to be a dead brain that doesn't move. Brain scans already gets quite small on living human brains; but I heard this estimate about 6 years ago and it sounds reasonable.

Not understanding how the brain works will always be a problem; its a nonlinear approximation (of the number 42?) as far as our general understanding of it goes--- even if the brain is just an analog version of such a math problem, those problems almost instantly scale beyond our grasp with only a few variables involved (just think in terms of linear algebra problems and how basic they have to be to "solve;" which doesn't necessarily mean we really fully understand the answers we get. For example, infinity--we work with it, get the concept but we never will fully understand it. )

Computing power grows at certain rates; one can use that combined with an estimate of how many transistors it takes per simulated neuron (or something like that) and estimate at what point we will have the power to load the brain scan data in and start trying to simulate a model of a real brain. Using custom designed chips and circuitry only make shorten the estimate as does clever new ways to simulate processes.

I'm guessing around 2030 but its hard to say. Doesn't mean that when somebody tries it something will happen...may have to give the thing simulated I/O as well to get anything from it. My guess is politics will be the worst problem as this kind of research gets closer to science fiction.