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.'"

Comments

Re:Why study the human brain then?

[mcgrew]

FFS, intelligence != sentience (the sci-fi book I'm writing notwithstanding; "fi" is fiction). My slide rule back in 1965 was intelligent, but it wasn't sentient. The Britannica I read at age 12 was more intelligent than I was (or not; info != intelligence), but your dog knows he's alive, he knows pain and pleasure. No computer can, or will, understand pain or pleasure (although they can fake them) until we invent chemistry-based replicants.

There is no such thing as artificial intelligence; Watson's intelligence is real, but it isn't Watson's. It's Watson's engineers' and programmers' intelligence.

The appearance of a thing does not equal that thing. Just ask the amazing Randi. Magicians do all sorts of cool tricks, as do programmers and engineers (most magic involves some engineering).

You are more than just a machine.