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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."
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.
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"Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip?"
No.
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.
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All you have to do is pick the right person and you can greatly reduce the number of neurons you'll need to model.
"Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip?"
Not YET.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
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...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.
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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.
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)?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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. :-)
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.
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Hi, BrainChip here - just logging on to let you know I do exist. Cheers, - BrainChip.
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.
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.
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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.
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.