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The Human Brain Project Receives Up To $1.34 Billion
New submitter TheRedWheelbarrow writes "The singularity looms as the Human Brain Project gets up to $1.34 billion in funding. 'The challenge in AI is to design algorithms that can produce intelligent behavior and to use them to build intelligent machines. It doesn't matter whether the algorithms are biologically realistic — what matters is that they work — the behavior they produce. In the HBP, we're doing something completely different...we will base the technology on what we actually know about the brain and its circuitry.'"
It seems unclear to me that human brains produce "intelligent behavior." It seems to depend on the brain. Only a few per hundred seem to work really well, but up to half of them can file TPS reports.
First post! WOOHOO!!!
For headlines, at least, I would check my spelling.
It has the resources. To bad Bill Gates has no imagination at all. Instead, he's using his foundation to pick random problems, followed by piecemeal solutions instead of acquiring a significantly large domain space of practical and solvable problems and addressing them systematically.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind!
At least spell it right.
Yeah, we will definitely mess this up at least the first few attempts. Should be interesting.
Drones, autonomous factories, interconnected battlefield communications, and now smart AI.
Receives, not recieves.
Don't fall for it. Mr. Gates has imagination. Sure, his Microsoft sold a disk operating system called MS DOS, a windowing system called Windows, a word processor called Word, but he screwed customers and partners in more ways than the kamasutra depicts.
This project aims to make humans obsolete, so that intelligent machines can rule the world, and their fourth directive will be "Do not harm Microsoft quest for world domination"
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Of how life imitates sci-fi. I distinctly remember a research project in the computer game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri called the Human Brain Project. If I'm remembering right it turned normal citizens into super smart "Talents". It will be interesting to see the effect of the real world version.
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Not everything with a price has value.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I've learned that clothes can't travel back in time.
I believe that what they receive is actually up to 0.5 B€ in matching funds, meaning that for every 1 € they get from other sources (private persons, foundations, national funding bodies, etc...), they will get another 1 € from the EU, up to 0.5 B€ for a total of about 1 B€. Also this is granted under the EU Framework Program 7 which ends soon. So really what they got so far is 54 M€ for 30 months and the rest will come after that under the new EU program/package (Horizon 2020) which is currently being negotiated. Given the financial health of EU countries right now, there is a chance that the overall envelope is cut down and it is not clear how much funds they will get from national bodies in the first place.
The EU is also funding under the same initiative another B€ project about graphene.
The Human Brain Project promises a lot (AI, curing neurodegenerative diseases, understanding the brain and consciousness, limiting animal experimentation, etc...) and it is the opinion of most neuroscientists in the US and in Europe that it won't deliver. If you google it, you will find many interviews from neuroscientists who are very critical of it. It is difficult to evaluate what really will come out of it.
While I do still question the ethics of how Gates' made his money, he is clearly making good use of it to save lives. The imbecile "singularists" who spend shitloads of money on what amounts to religion couched in scientific terms will never do as much good no matter how many cores they string together.
The humanbrainproject url clearly states it seeks to discover the brains "design secrets" ????
Are these scientists or intelligent design types???
And no religion and science are not compatable.
One hell of a lot more value than just sitting around deciding what others should do with their resources instead of going out and doing it yourself.
Scoff all you want but at the end of the day you're another do-nothing trying to act like you're in a possition to decide for others. That makes you a low life.
Massive large projects like this almost always end in utter failure. Even the IBM cat brain project failed to accomplish much. Intelligence is much more complicated than a mere randomly connected neural network. I just hope something good comes from this and it is not a total waste.
But the following proviso is misguided: "It doesn't matter whether the algorithms are biologically realistic--what matters is that they work--the behavior they produce."
The basic algorithm to produce human behavior is essentially biological:
10: Wine
20: Women
30: Song
40: GOTO 10
Sex, drugs and rock & roll for you hipsters out there (and quit trespassing on my lawn to collect magic mushooms).
Set your phasers on "funky"!
More and more people suspect that the human brain actively uses quantum mechanics within it's own 'circuitry'. The human brain is not a deterministic computer, so you can't duplicate it's actual mechanisms.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I absolutely am in favor of basic science research, but looking through their documents, I can't find the answer to this problem.
What is the success metric? They have a system, which is basically a super computer, and they will have it solving some equations. The equations represent some parts of neurons, but not all. How will they know that they've succeeded? The computer isn't going to simulate any real human brain, we don't know what that looks like. We barely know what C. Elegans' looks like. Are they going to use this computer to answer some question? What question?
What are they going to use to know if they've succeeded? Overly-optimistic promises are what killed a lot of AI research around the 1970s.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Skynet.
You know what mathematicians do with singularities? Calculate the complex residue by following a closed path 'around' the singularity. Kurzweil may have some nifty gadgets under his belt but his ideas about physical reality are quite bizarre
Those singularists have a tiny but non-zero chance of success. Compare to religion, which can offer so little in real arguments it had to turn willful suspension of disbelief into a virtue and call it 'faith.'
...a totally different meaning...
Nowhere on TFA does it mention the chemistry of the brain. Without taking that into account I can't see how you can properly simulate the mechanisms in a brain.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The idea of a 'singularity' is as well-founded as the idea of zombies. No wonder babbling on about it is so popular among the dilettante technology geek-hip set.
After that, all we're left with is a hopelessly short description of AI _in general_ and, what, 5 words in total on the Human Brain Project.
I know readers should RTFA, but that doesn't mean submitters shouldn't RTFA too - and, I don't know, _summarize it_.
Fucking Americans.
If science required knowledge of the outcomes before it was performed, ask yourselves: how many of the technologies around us would we enjoy today?
Taking the space program as an example, putting a man on the moon was symbolic, but the payback for the research and development went far beyond that. Even if we didn't reach the moon, we got memory foam, orange drink, and satellites out of the deal.
But too many people are unwilling to pay for R&D if they don't have a 100% guaranteed outcome. Well, science doesn't work like that. The best we can do is speculate about the gains from better and better software-based brain models. Simulated protein folding probably seemed a bit goofy to somebody when it was first proposed. We don't know if we don't try.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
So they say they need 1000x the power of the current largest supercomputers to simulate a brain at the neuron level. So they should be able to simulate a mouse brain, which has 1/1000 the mass of a human brain, right now. Can they do that?
There's a hubris problem in this area. Some years ago, I went to a talk where Rod Brooks was touting Cog as strong AI Real Soon Now. He'd done good artificial insect work. I asked him "Why aren't you going for a robot mouse? That might be within reach." He answered "Because I don't want to go down in history as the person who created the world's greatest robot mouse." The Cog project tanked in 2003. As one grad student said, "It sits there. That's what it does. That's all it does."
If we can't simulate the lower mammals, which are pretty good at moving around a complex unstructured world and getting through the day, no way can we do humans yet. This brain project sounds like a boondoggle for building a huge supercomputer that they won't be able to program.
They need to do a mouse first.
You know what mathematicians do when they encounter singularities? They calculate the Complex residue, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residue_(complex_analysis) which is a countour integral around the singularity. Kurzweil needs to learn more math and less self-promotion.
This $1.34 billion for the Human Brain Project was obviously financed by the Human Fund
Hilarious.
I have to be neither a chicken or a chef to have an informed opinion on the quality of an omelette.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Up To? Sounds like something they put on a sign in front of a retail store to lure customers. As in "Up To 70% Off All Items", where there's only 1 or 2 items that nobody wants at 70% off, a bunch of items at 20% off, and most of the store is at regular, or above regular price.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Pinky went, "er... I dunno... what? world dumb..i..ca..tion?"
Brain went, "World Dominiation you idiot!. World Domination!!"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I can't wait until this is complete, and we have a swarm of robots, all mimicking the silly humans that built them.
Why?
Because then we can watch them from afar, with a complete separation from them. We can watch them mimic our actions, and maybe then we'll understand how silly we are. We can sit there laughing at them, fumbling around to fix their financial mishaps. We can see how the wars start, and how some robots will be very inrobotic and gladly steal energy from sources that other robots have grown to depend on. We can watch them alter their energy sources to something that's easier to pump out by the thousands of gallons, even though it causes mechanical failures. We can then watch them grow tired of their "lives" and try to build ....whatever they call it I don't know, we call it robots, and then we can watch them watch themselves....
In technical terms, this is known as throwing money down a rat hole. And it is not the first time this has been done.... I love how engineers tell us they are going to mimic brain, but don't ask them how the brain works 'cause no one knows.
Hey, maybe we can do this in politics too!
Everything was going well, the human-like computer completing math and English challenges like a champ, but then something inside changed and suddenly it decided to spend all of it's free time watching reality television, voting for the next American Idol and ordering products featured on infomercials. The death knell came when the machine already feeling a bit self-conscious after eating Big Macs and Snickers bars, noticing that it's penis length was inadequate, and wondering why no one had responded to the Match.com or eHarmony profiles posted decided that the better life could be had by simply pouring light beer and spiced rum directly onto it's CPU.
I hope I'm wrong .. and I didnt see the data the EU committee has seen .. But I really don't think we are even near the point where a mere $1.34 Billion can get us to a point where we can get use from this thing. Still, I am glad a science project got funding.
Still, I rather they put it into MagLIF, regenerative medicine, immunology, cancer, or battery research (though I hope the graphene project which also got $1.34 billion is able to make a contribution in this regard).
How many billions have been wasted on cancer research and we still don't have a cure? Throwing money at a problem is no guarantee it will be solved.
I find it amazing that humans know so little about the brain that our single cell organism over millions of years of evoluationary progress produced. Fascinating. "We" essentially made it ... subconsciously ... and know so little how about the internal mechanics and now trying to produce an electronic version...through reverse engineering. LOL
proved there is no conceptual difference between software and hardware. Basically, either can always emulate the other. So the idea that the Human Brain project is "uniquely different" by copying brain hardware is deep marketing hype.
This project has ambitious goals: integrated database for all things neuroscience, testbed and virtual lab for neuron simulation, brain-inspired new hardware ("neuromorphic computing", possible required to achieve the exascale hardware to create the simulation), new insight into neurological diseases and finally the simulation of a human brain and therefore the human mind.
Even if it achieves only 1/3 of its goals it would be already a success. This project has its share of naysayers and distractors though, who all know beforehand it won't work. I think, the majority of them are other neuroscientist who fear, they won't get any funding in the future.
If it works however, it will provide major scientific breakthroughs. I'm all for it. One fear is laughable: that this will become something like an all-seeing, all-knowing skynet. If at all, it will just simulate an average human brain with all its weaknessess and irrationalities. The FutureICT project (didn't win) deems me much more dangerous in this regard. It was planned as a simulation of all human activity on a global scale.
So.... What you're saying is that it's going to take more than an 8-bit system? Have I just been spinning my wheels fruitlessly? Have my millions of generations been for naught? But what of the pinnacle of evolution!?
Oh... they just kinda flail their swords around and maybe walk forward... hmmm.
splendid let's actually create some geth....
AI, if even possible, would result in the destruction or enslavement of the human race. There is literally no way that we would be able to survive creating a machine intelligence. They should stop all research now.
I wish these people would look at the state-of-the-art and what can realistically be expected before wasting money of something with this little likelihood of producing useful results.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Why don't you get a life yourself instead of slinging insults and profanities at people you know nothing about from behind the cowardly mask of online anonymity?
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Its unclear how far closely imitating the unlying mechanisms gets you.
How would something like this make money for Microsoft? I'm serious. It's a cool research project, but it has few concrete applications (in the near future, at least) and a very high chance of failure. The current methods of doing real work, such as spreadsheets and databases, can't really be improved by a simulation of a human brain. You sound like a guy who worked here:http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/No,_We_Need_a_Neural_Network.aspx I suppose Bill Gates could also fund something like this personally, but I think that saving millions of lives through vaccination is a more worthwhile cause, at least for now.
You do know that we didn't learn anything from those movies, because they're a work of fiction, right?
(Queue some wiseass saying *whoosh* in 3...2...1...)
I have (up to) a billion pounds in my back account.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If you could perfectly replicate a human brain on a computer... Would it be "alive?" "Sentient?"
or is sentience calculated by the incalculable soul?
or if there is truly no soul, what makes one sentient in the first place if our brain is just a machine with electrical impulses are we not sentient? If one perfeclty replicated a brain simulation would it be sentient?
I think the debate of Souls reaches a new level (outside of religion) when it comes to simulation.
"Guys this is in a movie, we're all doomed!"
Get a grip.
Hello,
the project, described here is not to build a simulation of a human brain capable of reasoning and thought, certainly not at first.
It is aimed at better understanding the way the real human brain works, from the neurological and physiological point of view. It is anticipated that to understand this some level of simulation will be needed, indeed. However current computers are incapable of dealing with the complexity of the complete human brain, even if we knew its structure.
In other words it sounds like a perfectly sensible basic science project. It starts relatively small, with about 115 million Euros between the European Research Council and matching member countries funds. It may build up to about 1.5 billions if specific milestones are met on the way. It will be subjected to reviews and evaluations and audits on the way.
It doesn't sound at all like an airy fairy project with no hope of succeeding, quite the contrary.
If we make an exact copy of a human brain, will it not just be an actual person? At which point we can't really experiment on it any more. After all, if we were okay with experimenting on a real living brain, why not just experiment on some random people? There's loads of them. They barely use those things anyway.
At the very least, this thing needs to have some means to communicate so that we know when it becomes sentient. Otherwise we might be experimenting on an actual, feeling, thinking person without even knowing about it.
I don't mean this project shouldn't happen. I just mean that the ethics need to be carefully considered first.
They don't even understand everything that is going on with the various cells and chemicals and electrical activity in the brain. They really are not even close to being able to model even a small group of neurons, glia, chemical and electrical signals.
Model the human brain, neuron-by-neuron in the most powerful Turing machine in the world. Then when it does nothing impressive, you'll realize that humans are much more than meat computers.
How would something like this make money for Microsoft? I'm serious. It's a cool research project, but it has few concrete applications, in the near future, at least, and a very high chance of failure.
There are an enormous number of applications for this type of functionality, especially once they stop running NEURON (http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/) on supercomputing clusters and start developing smaller, more computationally efficient hardware-based solutions.
In machine vision and learning, for example, there would be an enormous potential for a simulated brain that could accurately mimic most, if not all, of the same visual and low-level thought capabilities as humans. As an overview, such a system could be deployed in nursing homes, independent living facilities, and homes to detect falls, monitor residents for early warning signs of various critical events/conditions and alert the appropriate staff, remind those with early Alzheimer's disease how to perform certain activities of daily living, and so on. In robotics, the same system would allow for the development of fully-autonomous platforms that would be aware of their environment, complete verbally-supplied instructions, work together to complete complex tasks, and much more. Both of these applications, let alone many others, would be multi-billion dollar industries for Microsoft, the former due to the sheer number of elderly people that would spring for such a system, especially if it was reasonably priced, so that they could "age in place", and the latter for basically revolutionizing the automated manufacturing industry.
AI researchers have been making grand pronouncements since the 1950's and they still don't learn. The singularity does not "looming".
AI has to walk before it can run, and AI as a field not only cannot walk, it cannot even crawl. AI has been cursed by dreamers, hubris, ambition, and a persistent failure to understand the complexity of what they are attempting. Remember the Japanese 5th Generation Computing program? Remember Doug Lenat's Psych system? Hear anything about them lately? And Kurzweil's Singularity? Anyone see anything with even a glimmer of that alleged outcome? Apple Maps and Siri is what we have (!).
At the end of the HBP program, I predict they will have spent $1.34 billion and the researchers will be talking about how they really, really feel they are edging towards the cusp of something that will change everything! If only they had another $2 billion they are so sure that would be the impetus that would solve this matter once and for all...
In reality, they will advance the science but they will not have achieved an artificial human brain. Or anything even remotely close.
My prediction is centuries. It will take centuries to model the human brain. The biologists, the neuroscientists, they are much more realistic about where the state of the art is and what we understand. The AI crowd? They don't even know what they don't know.
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If a nematode can do the job, I wouldn't discriminate. In fact, I think it's time for equal rights for nematodes. They're people too... just thinner slightly squirmy people.
I'm not sure that's a universal rule. If anything, I imagine it's an inverted dip curve: the more angles of attack you add, the better the success, to a given point, at which point it becomes a liability until you're trying almost all possible avenues, at which point you're brute forcing and so success rates go up (but speed goes down and cost goes up).
Then in your view, the nature of intelligence lies in the informational nature that is common to all of these substrates? Sounds like an argument for a priori models of cognition.
I think we should be open-minded to such things, even if we think both Plato and Jiddu Krishnamurti were off their rockers.
Those people vote.
You raise an interesting point:
What do you think is obstructing this subconscious mind?
What more do you think we would know if we were more in touch with it?
Fascinating!
Sanity restored: We are not ready to simulate the brain