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Why We Should Build a Supercomputer Replica of the Human Brain
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Wired:
"[Henry] Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted to build a working mind from the ground up. ... The self-assured scientist claims that the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety — from the molecular level all the way to the mystery of consciousness — is a lack of ambition. If only neuroscience would follow his lead, he insists, his Human Brain Project could simulate the functions of all 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and the 100 trillion connections that link them. And once that's done, once you've built a plug-and-play brain, anything is possible. You could take it apart to figure out the causes of brain diseases. You could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new range of intelligent technologies. You could strap on a pair of virtual reality glasses and experience a brain other than your own."
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Simulating how the neurons and connections function won't be enough. You also need an initial state for each of them. Get even a tiny precentage of them wrong, and the result would probably be a virtual seizure.
sudo cat /dev/me > /dev/you
You are not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported to God.
I doubt Kim Jong Un would volunteer to help the project anyway.
As a developer, I think initiatives like this are important.
As a person, I can't help but think that being the person trapped inside the computer would be absolutely horrifying.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It doesn't need to be a mirror image, but it needs to "develop" in the same manner.
The brain is plastic.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
This is why I regularly thank my toaster.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I think the stake holders need to think about that simple question. The last thing we need is some sentient silicon running around like a pestilent child lobbing nukes between hemispheres for fun.
Pestilent children are the worst, with all their plagues and their boils and their oozing pustules.
Sentience? I bet it won't be capable of meaningful phrases!
C'mon. You can model every circuit in the brain - and assuming it's really just like a big, deterministic watch works, you could still get a Jerry Falwell or Ryan Seacrest instead of a sentient being.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Robots will be so good at complex tasks that they will find it overkill to use one for simple tasks. They'll simply say, why waste a robot on this task when we have all of these stupid humans who are willing to do it for basically nothing. Half the quality at an eighth the price. Can't beat that.
We've long established that the source of the human "soul" is in the brain. Those interconnections give rise to consciousness and self-awareness -- and sentience. If you build something that precisely models the brain, you will be creating sentience. I have to question how we can create a sentient creature simply to experiment upon it and still claim to have a shred of humanity to us.
I know that this is not as dazzling and interesting as building the device to geeks like us, but we cannot simply ignore the ethical consequences of our actions. All vocations, all manner of human endeavor, must move forward with an eye towards a respect for life. This may not be human life we're creating, or even organic life, but it is no less deserving.
Someday we're going to have cybernetic life walking about. And I have to wonder -- how well will they treat us, when they find out how ethical we were in creating it?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The brain "develops" in humans for a very long time though, to work around /with that the mechanical brain would either need to be able to develop itself or start off in an adult state.
I have my doubts about the success of this project, but we've got to start somewhere & we'd learn a lot with this project, not like we don't spend our country's money on wars, or policing / giving aid to people who hate us instead.
If it's on the internet, maybe it will post to Slashdot as an A/C.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Say this actually works. We create a brain and start down the long path of "teaching" it just like with new-born humans.
What happens when we detect that the brain is "experiencing pain" (we already know that pain has a detectable neurological basis right?)
What happens when we detect the brain is experiencing depression?
What are our responsibilities then? Is this thing a human, a lab-rat, or a machine?
What exactly are "the functions of all 86 billion neurons"? I sense massive oversimplification here. Neurons have lots and lots of functions we have no idea how to simulate exactly, such as all the details of the thousands of networked internal metabolic mechanisms of any large mammalian cell, which most neural network simulations simply neglect.
Furthermore, we have plenty of evidence that the non-neuronal components of the brain (glia and oligodendroglia) massively influence brain functioning, and may be required for adequate cognition. Furthermore we have no way of knowing if a brain-in-a-vat will work the way a brain in the body, with all its connections, works. The above issues are just a start to the limitations of the scheme.
They're going to build the matrix!
To put it in perspective, that 86 billion neurons would be 86 "giga-neurons"; huh, conceptually not too overwhelming. Then we have the 100 trillion connections between them, or 100 "tera-connections"? Forget it.
Not to even mention (as someone already did) the initial state, then the learning process. To even form this structure in RAM would require, what? 40-50 more Moores Law iterations? Which I doubt is even physically possible.
I think this is the wrong approach, and even if possible, not in our lifetimes....
Global Thermonuclear Chess? I'm in!
Please don't waste your time with this nonsense.
1. It is not possible to simulate a system when you don't know the rules of the system. We don't know how neurons work. Sure, we know much about neurons and we can set up small networks that seem to give interesting results, but there is a vast amount about real neurons that is unknown. We don't even know what all the types of ion channels are, let alone the varied states of modulation (phosphorylation of proteins and binding of various neuromodulators). We know little about how the brain learns. We have some knowledge about how a neuron might maintain a mean firing rate over time or how certain connections may vary in fairly artificial stimulus regimes (pairs of spikes with varied timing) in slices of brain tissue (typically hippocampus) in vitro. We have only basic understanding of how the brain is wired up on a microscopic scale (e.g. cortical columns). At this point people are still making fundamental discoveries about how the retina works.
2. Throwing a supercomputer at the problem would be orders of magnitude too weak, even given huge simplifying assumptions, such as using "integrate and fire" neurons.
Anyone attempting to do whole brain simulations at this point is simply wasting their time and a lot of electricity. When they promote the idea they waste other people's time. A perfect example of this is the fool who claimed that he had simulated a cat visual cortex, which though only a presentation at a conference, not a published paper, got attention here on Slashdot. He included one equation and randomly connected his network and then simulated on a large compute cluster. His "chief scientific conclusion" was that he could replicate the propagation speed of data through the layers of the network - a feat that could have been accomplished with paper and pencil in less time.
No, you cannot make a supercomputer which will be a replica of the human brain. First of all, we don't know enough about the biochemical workings of the brain to do that. Every day the literature contains papers in which the incredibly complex soup inside cells shows us some ridiculous interaction we could not have predicted.
It would be the equivalent of building a lemonade stand, staffing it with a five-year-old, and claiming that you were replicating the US economy.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
use human DNA to program the simulation. If the the DNA in a human zygote can develop into a brain, why can't a simulation of the DNA develop into the simulation of a human brain?
Greed is the root of all evil.
How do you know it isn't already?
OOooooooo! Spooky!
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
As a neuroscientist, this seems absurd. Not all neurons perform the same functions, some are very different in terms of structure and connections (pyramidal cell vs interneuron for example). We don't have a good sense for all the multitude of ways they can connect (via axon projections, or through retrograde signals at a given synapse). And we're just starting to appreciate the role that non neuron brain cells play in cellular communication - astrocytes release signaling molecules that modulate neuronal function (caffeine interferes with these) and they also regulate the amount of ions around neurons - in essence they enable neurons to change states.
i don't know karate, but i know ca-razy
If it's on the internet, maybe it will post to Slashdot as an A/C.
you insensitive clod!
some of us simulations have registered accounts!
In order to construct a virtual brain, doesn't that mean it has to be grown, virtually? What would be the environment in which it grows?
... The self-assured scientist claims that the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety — from the molecular level all the way to the mystery of consciousness — is a lack of ambition.
This.
Also, the lack of any sort of a roadmap as to how to do this.
Also, the lack of any sort of definition for "consciousness", or any indication that it is an emergent property, or any way to measure when you've succeeded in making consciousness, or any theoretical evidence at all that it would arise from any specific plan.
We could model as many neurons as we like and it *still* wouldn't be a human brain unless we figure out how those neurons connect with each other. With no detailed plan, it's like trying to build a house by tacking boards together.
The "self-assured scientist" could start by telling us how a Cortical Column is wired up, how the feedback and feed-forward between columns works, and why artificial neural nets have inputs on one side and outputs on the other, when the brain apparently has both inputs and outputs on one side (in the sense of a functional diagram; ie - the efferent and afferent neurons connect to the same level of layer), and what the distinction is between these models.
If he can't solve basic issues, how can he hope to succeed in such a complex and ambitions project?
How on earth do they manage to sell this bullshit to politicians and sponsors?
How? Same as everything else: with a great sales pitch.
The idea that "the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety ... is a lack of ambition" is utterly ludicrous. That's like saying the "only thing" that's keeping human beings from walking on Mars is a lack of ambition.
Breakfast served all day!
A pestilent child will bo lobbing antrax, smallpox, and/or ebola, not nukes. Get your WMD straight.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
If we were to be able to build an AI, what would we teach it? Stuff that's taught in school? Would we do anything to simulate social development? Would we let it read through 4chan?
So much of what makes us intelligent, rather than simply smart, is through experiences. So how would we simulate experiences?
Indeed, this seems to be something these sorts of projects forever overlook - the point. If you create a conscious model of the human brain, then you have all the same ethical problems experimenting on it as you would on an actual human, all you've done is drastically increase the potential benefits of doing so, and I for one do not particularly want to live in a world where it's accepted that you can experiment on someone's brain just because "the benefits are worth it".
You could possibly learn something new by just being able to watch it in action in excrutiating detail, but all the parts at least are only going to work in the manner you programmed them to, so really it comes down to a test case to see if our understanding of the component mechnisms of the brain has captured the "secret sauce" of consciousness. Even that though has major ethical considerations - it's unlikely to work right the first time, and all the intermediate attempts are rather analogous to intentionally creating children with severe brain damage.
And that's not to mention the fact that we may well need completely new technology to simulate a brain effectively - all existing computers are clocked, and any simulation is going to by necessity work in discrete time slices, which is completely unlike the totally asynchronous, continuous operation of an organic brain. Even if we can somehow manage the simulation by, for example, using extremely fine time slices and running it at a tiny fraction of real-time, it will still likely require several orders of magnitude more processing power than the human brain itself possesses. I mean the architectual differences mean it took a decent Pentium-class machine in order to be able to simulate an ancient AtariXT in real time, and those two systems are practically identical compared to a brain.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
From the article:
"There are too many things we don't yet know," says Caltech professor Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at one of neuroscience's biggest data producers, the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. "The roundworm has exactly 302 neurons, and we still have no frigging idea how this animal works."
That's the problem. Just because we can extract the wiring diagram doesn't mean the components are well understood yet. Also, if we understood the components and how to wire them up, it would be cheaper to just build hardware. Simulating neurons is slow. It's like running SPICE instead of building circuits. Works, but there's about a 1000x or worse speed, power, and cost penalty. GPUs are often simulated at the gate level before making an IC; NVidia uses twenty or thirty racks of servers to simulate one GPU during development.
What bothers me about claims of strong AI is that I've heard it before. Ed Feigenbaum, the "expert systems" guy at Stanford, was running around in the 1980s, promising Strong AI Real Soon Now if only he could funding for a giant national AI lab headed by him. He even testified before Congress on that. Expert systems were a dead end.
Rod Brooks from MIT went down this road too. His COG project had a robotic head and some arms, some facial expressions, and a lot of hype. Work ceased on that embarrassment in 2003. He'd done good artificial insect work, but the jump to human level was way too big.
This is the hubris problem in AI. Too many people have approached this claiming their One Big Idea would lead to strong AI. So far, not even close.
All the mammals have similar DNA and brain architecture. A mouse brain is about 1g; a human brain is about 1000g. So build a simulated mouse brain and demonstrate it works, or STFU.
And naturally a petulant pestilent child is that much worse.
Wouldn't a major feature of the design be emulating how a wetware brain can reconfigure it's own neural connections? I'm assuming here that we're talking about creating a "blank slate" brain and allowing it to learn and develop it's own personality.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
The last thing we need is some sentient silicon running around like a pestilent child lobbing nukes between hemispheres for fun.
If scientists persist in trying to play God with projects like this, they are going to unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse:
War, Famine, Death, and Petulance.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I quite agree, the brain appears to operate nothing whatsoever like any artificial computer currently in existence, but how is that relevant to the article? He's talking about completely simulating the function of every individual neuron in the brain. If the behaviour of a single neuron can be accurately simulated, then it's a reasonable logical extrapolation to suggest that with 96 billion times the memory and processing power you could accurately simulate the entire brain. And if you can simulate a brain then it's not unreasonable to expect that a mind could exist within it. Of course there's a few levels of "if" in there, and it would likely require several orders of magnitude more iformation processing capacity than the virtual brain itself would possess, but the idea is not to create a practical AI, but a practical working model of the brain to further our understanding of how it actually works.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Unless the brain taps into some unknown force of nature, it can be completely simulated and run on any computer available today. Might run a little slow on a flip phone, but still..
$ csh
$ Why rub two sticks together?
Why: No match.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
... once you've built a plug-and-play brain, anything is possible. You could take it apart to figure out the causes of brain diseases. You could rig it to robotics and develop a whole new range of intelligent technologies.
You can watch it go immediately insane from sensory deprivation.
Modeling the brain is not enough. You have to model enough of its supporting systems and environment to keep it functioning.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The last thing we need is some sentient silicon running around
As long as they don't give the supercomputer legs, it won't be running around.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Once someone successfully build a computer that can simulate 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connection all at the same time, someone else will build an even bigger computer that can do 10x as much, and then someone will attempt to up that ... ad nauseum
What will happen then, when the computer we build is 100x or even 1,000,000x more capable than our brain ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is assuming that there is such a thing as a blank slate brain, or that any brain can be shaped in arbitrary ways.
Brains grow. In fact, learning to play an instrument at an early age can actually cause changes to the folds of the brain visible to the naked eye. That is a dramatic example, but I'm sure there are a bazillion subtle ways the physical wiring of the brain gets set in near-permanent ways as it is forming. Some of that might be the result of experience, but some is likely the result of genetics, or even just chance.
first
Wait! You're misunderstanding him. He means that it is a stupid question and that if we must answer the question then it is that we should build a supercomputer replica of a human brain is so that we can say we did it first. He wants to put science back on the map. He wants to make our children interested in solving the problems of tomorrow. He wants us to be first!
Or they just want to post first...
It is up to you what you believe.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It doesn't need to be a mirror image, but it needs to "develop" in the same manner.
The brain is plastic.
simulating that needs simulating quite a lot more than what the guy is proposing, hence why people label his project as impossible.
we have trouble modelling the interactions of a few hundred atoms. never mind all the atoms the brain has. HOWEVER THAT IS UNDER CONSTANT RESEARCH already without dumping cash on this guy and "following his lead".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.