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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.
My work here is dung.
"Can We Build a Human Brain Into a Microchip?"
Not YET.
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. :-)
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Do you work in management?
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.
My work here is dung.
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.