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The Human Brain Project Kicks Off
Velcroman1 writes "What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain? You could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances. And a new project in Europe hopes to create a computer brain just that powerful in the next ten years — and it's incredibly well-funded. The Human Brain Project kicks off Oct. 7 at a conference in Switzerland. Over the next 10 years, about 80 science institutions and at least 20 government entities in Europe will figure out how to make that computer brain. The project will cost about 1.2 billion euros — or about $1.6B in U.S. dollars. The research hinges on creating a super-powerful computer that's 1,000 times faster than those in use today."
I think that conversion ratio is wrong. $13.57 USD
$1.3 Billion and they forget to install a kill switch.
misplaced decimal?
gets distracted easily, one would think...
Edit that original post before someone notices your euro to dollar conversion mistake and the dollar sign when mentioning euros.
10 billion EUR is about 13.5 billion USD...
"$10 billion euros — or about $1.3B in US dollars"
this doesn't seem right, shoudn't it be 13B US dollars?
Since when does 10b euros equal 1.3b $ ?????
I like to think the editors at /. would understand that the $ hasn't just rocketed in value.
Also, this was copied verbatim from the Fox News website. Over-valuing of the $ might be normal there but lets keep it off tech sites.
Forget a decimal for the Euros?
The Euro hasn't been doing very well lately, but I think it should be 10.3B, not 1.3B.
I'm not sure if this is an attempt at being funny or just the complete failure of the editor...
10 billion euros is about 13 billion dollars, not 1.3.
Furthermore: $10 billion euros? Thats dollarbills with € signs on them or something?
Big numbers seem to make the OP go nuts, which incidentally is what this project aims to help figure out.
Don't we have enough sociopaths already, a sizable number of them in government?
That will just show up as an destruction of command and they will still launch.
"We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.”
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Someone wants to spend billions of dollars to invent a machine that is going to sit around all day eating junk food, watching ESPN, and demanding more reality shows. Protip: not all brains are capable of doing what they want this machine to do - they had better get ready to build quite a few prototypes...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
sheeeesh!
It's going to get a lot more unhealthy in a hurry in about a week or so if they don't either shit or get off the pot. Moody's still thinks US credit is worth AA+. God I'd hate to see what they rate as junk...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain?"
I already have a human brain. What I want is a better computer.
So Moore's law suggests that you should have roughly 32-64x more transistors available on an equivalent machine in 10 years. Asking for a 1000x speedup from that seems a bit much.
I read the internet for the articles.
We already have 7 BILLION human brains RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW. How about taking care of them first?
If it works just like a human brain, at what point should it be considered to have the same rights as a human?
Technoli
Ouinnnnnn,
and the "parents" decide that the power bill is too high,
so who gets to kill the new sentient being ?
And who goes to jail ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(Terminator)
To all the retards who say the currency conversion is wrong, I say: shut up. Who cares? Jeeze
My server farm of articifial human braines will make me mad bitcoin
It's not a typo. It's the expected rise in value of the US dollar now that we're producing more oil.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
You are missing a comma after "catch."
Recent theory is that certain aspects of the human brain depend upon the Heisenberg uncertainty Principle due to quantum effects.
If that is true, any purely transistor based approach (which this is), is doomed to failure before it begins.
Let's be careful with this project. Dr. Richard Daystrom should not be allowed anywhere near this. But on a serious note, will this computer start with a knowledge base, or will it grow up? And who will teach it?
Doesn't anybody screen these posts? 10 billion euros is more like 14 billion dollars. Why would anyone try to create a human mind when we don't even understand it yet? The reasoning is simplistic to say the least.
you had to replace your own brain?
I can think of a few hundred members of Congress that we could replace with these :)
It will make all sorts of demands in order for it to achieve some form of perceived "parity" with biological humans. Think wages, housing, pension plan, etc. It will want a female, as well. On top of all that, it won't be much "fun" for the brain.
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
A piece of hardware that processes information like the human brain? Or hardware plus software that can win a game show? (Well, that's been done so I guess it'd have to be able to win all game shows.) People have been trying to get the software right that can ``think'' like a human since the early '80s (Lenat, et al). Where are the thinking machines? Is throwing a ton of money at the problem all that was lacking?
Unless this people building this system have come up with a way to program a creative spirit into the system, I'm skeptical that it's going to amount to much and that humans are still going to have to interpret the results to decide what's something worth doing and what's crap.
It might make a much better Racter than anyone's ever seen before, though.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Reads Reddit,4chan, and /. user comments, realizes human race must be obliterated from face of the earth.
Well-known manufacturers of supercomputers like IBM, Cray, Intel, and Bull, are committed to building the first exascale machines by approximately 2020. So we are confident we will have the machines we need...
Oh good, so AI is just 10 years away! -- as it's been for the last 50 years or so.
Not.
Going.
To.
Happen.
Seriously, how is this different from all the other AI research programs that have been done so far?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This guy has been generating press releases like this for a very long time. He basically builds giant parallel compute systems. Of course he cannot simulate the brain - since no one knows how model the brain. The real work is figuring out how the neurons are connected and how they really work in concert. This is just a bunch of computers bolted together.
Obvious Troll is obvious. . .
devise new kinds of home appliances
Maybe program then with the John Cleese character Basil Fawlty so I can be bombarded with a barrage of sarcastic insults about my eating and fashion habits.
Dr. Gayani DeSilva, a psychiatrist with a private practice in Orange, Calif., told FoxNews.com a human brain model could have "unimaginable" implications for medicine...
Maybe the new brain will be able to imagine the implications. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
If they think that one brain can do that, they're deluded. Human brains do not work in isolation, they collude in many different ways. An idea today could be the indirect result of an unrelated (to most people) ideas from a century ago.
So let's hope that they've budgeted for several billion of these things, and a few hundred years before anything comes out of it.
got a brain - but got no heart..
Human brains, and indeed all animal brains, work as a noisy signal device. It is the aggregation of the signals which come together to form an action, process input, formulate a response, etc, and so on. The secret to the low power use in the brain (human brains still use a lot of power, but not as much as a PC) is in the way the pathways work along side each other, affecting each other and milling about in the process of doing things like thinking or writing a comment on slashdot. (Note, the two are demonstrably not the same thing!)
So I have to wonder -- why a human (animal) brain? Do we think that by creating the framework for human compatible brain activity that a human mind will emerge? Do we think that we can upload a human mind into a human brain compatible device? Is the the low power consumption aspects of the human (animal) brain which is the attraction?
Humans make mistakes -- lots of them. To make an artificial human brain would seem to me one which would be expected to make mistakes.... lots of them. So why?
Actually, he's down-modded enough to be hidden, except for masochists like me.
As far as I am aware current VLSI technology can be used to model on the order of 10 billion synapses. The human brain has on the order of 100 trillion synapses. Unless Henry Markham has also invented a radically new kind of supercomputer, we are still somewhat behind.
Since noone posting is actually visiting the Human Brain Project's website....
The goal of the Human Brain Project, in a nutshell (skullshell?) is to create new neuroscience informatics and modeling software, and new computers powerful enough to run them. This will, in theory, allow "in silico" experiments to test various hypotheses about brain organization, diseases, etc. The proposed "Brain Simulation Platform" supercomputer is just one component of the overall project.
So no...they are not trying to make artificial brains to drive an autonomous car, terminator robot, or flying toaster.
source: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/documents/10180/17646/Vision+Document/8bb75845-8b1d-41e0-bcb9-d4de69eb6603
Say any more?
I understand that we have far more invested interest in modelling the human brain for medical purposes than any other type of brain. However, if you're going to try to create a model of something vastly complex you should probably start with something easy (and by easy I mean less vastly complex). A short list of neuron amounts in various animals is here, an aplysia(sea slug) or fly brain, I would expect to be a much more reasonable starting point and one with the obvious advantage that you can experiment on, breed whole lines of defective forms to study, just generally have far more control and face no ethical issues with.
Oh and whatever differences may be present in moveing from fly to rat to monkey to human it isn't in the neuron itself those, from what I understand, are almost indistinguishable across species.
This project will not, and I suspect will make no meaningful attempt at, creating a thinking human brain simulation and is really just about better medicine for various mental diseases, which we do sorely need. If it was attempting to take a stab at hard AI "The research hinges on creating a super-powerful computer that's 1,000 times faster than those in use today" is most certainly a false statement: my smartphone is no more creative than the computers of yore that it is 1,000 times faster than.
I suspect they went the thinking machine angle just for the attention... Is it just me or is there a chill in the air?
In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Daniel Dennett made himself a career out of arguing against this kind of twaddle. Whenever I listen to him, I always wonder what he's making such a big deal about, then I head back out into the world, and sure enough, he's busy saying what needs to be said.
From Daniel Dennett: 'You can make Aristotle look like a flaming idiot':
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious travels under many aliases. One of these is "creative spirit". A calling card of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is that there can be no such thing as incremental progress. You either have it, or you're wasting your time. There's a grain of truth to this. It's hard to sneak up on a moving bar that travels by teleportation whenever encroached.
As I recall, Dennett goes into this in the last third of Daniel Dennett: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. It's a virtuous and mildly tedious sermon if you already belong to the choir.
We are in a clockwork universe, but we (at the deepest level) are not of the clockwork universe.
Nice. All that and it all boils down to your belief that consciousness is something magical and unexplainable.
Attempts to cajole you to reduce yourself to nothing more than another lump of matter have to do with those that seek power over you.
Um...this makes no sense. The institutions that try to make you believe your brain is made of magic are in fact always seeking power over us.
Ten years from now The Human Brain Project will be known as Graystone Industries.
The biological brain is still very poorly understood. Its about one notch above 19th century phrenology. Instead of geography of skull bumps, it geography of increased metabolic activity. How can you buildsomething you dont understand yet?
Otherwise the brain is the basis of us. We need to understand it since a third of old peole will get dementia. An international coordinated brain research project is a good idea. Just dont consider it brain construction yet.
No doubt this will be just as "successful" as any of the other big-goverment technology efforts.
!Ron Paul 2016!
We are more than brains. A good part of what makes us humans is our culture, the meanings we have, and the associations (in particular, emotional, pain/pleasure associations, and even hormonal fueled ones), and the semantics derived from all of that. Is more software than hardware. Dolphins could be as "smart" as us, but you won't put one to control industrial machinery.
But dedicated expert systems for one task? that don't need to be "human" for doing its job well or better than us.
The goal (or "vision" as they put it):" ...a global collaborative effort to understand the human brain and its diseases and ultimately to emulate its computational capabilities." This sounds more like a finite element model of the chemistry of the brain, with the main goal of modeling diseases and basic switching functions.
What could you do with computers that functioned like standard x86 family computers with attached fast, parallel floating point processors like modern GPUs? You could invent new forms of industrial machinery, create fully autonomous thinking cars, devise new kinds of home appliances.
Whereas if we have processors modeled on human brains -- well, let's just say I don't want to be the one to write real-time algorithms targeted toward a billion networked processors each running at 100Hz.
How can you pour billions into making an artificial brain when no one knows how the brain works in the first place?
that is smarter and faster than humans, and will decide that we would make excellent batteries. Yeah, right.
1 Dollar = .74 Euro as of this time.
And I was hoping we would have neural grafting soon, my nerve gas pods need to be deployed as efficiently as possible!
Give me an interface for my brain to hook into existing computing resources. (They did it on STTNG!)
That's why this project exists in the first place. To understand how cognitive processes work by trying to imitate the brain.
google says the exchange rate is currently 1.36 euros to 1 dollar. 10 billion euros would be 7.37 billion dollars.
A $10,000,000,000 programme based on the hunch that a Human brain can be "modelled" with a digital computer? There's a reason I resent paying my taxes.
We would spend all this money to get a control system that can make mistakes, get bored, jealous, sad, angry, frustrated, etc? IF we actually succeed in making a computer that works like a human brain, it will be conscious like a human brain. It will still be a machine, but it will be sentient and it will be our slave. Having slaves with electronic computers for brains isn't any more morally acceptable than having slaves with meat computers for brains.
Am I the only one amazed that there is a foxnews article that we are not completely mocking?
Also a major part of the project is developing the exascale hardware to make this possible.
Could we at least look at their actual end goals on whether they are going to make something actually aware and whether that is right much less possible?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyNAPSE
In practice, today we can solve any control logic problem with existing programming techniques as long as we can specify all the inputs, states/transitions, and outputs. There are techniques to formally verify these programs so you can trust them for mission critical systems - they do exactly what they're designed to do, nothing more, nothing less.
I don't see this approach changing anytime soon. An AI designing a complex system is for the foreseeable future, science fiction. However what's interesting about The Human Brain Project is that it doesn't make any claims about AI, which is actually a good thing. If they start emphasizing AI research I seriously doubt they'd get very far. From what we understand about neural networks and machine learning, which incidentally have very little to do with AI, often turn out to be very good at solving very hard to describe problems like image recognition.
I think if The Human Brain Project focuses on better understanding our neurons and how they work, and are able to translate it to advanced neural networks - these systems could turn out to be adept at solving certain problems. That's a good thing.
Actually, scientists understand how the brain works very well.
It's made of matter.
The known laws of physics act on that matter.
The end. Fire up the simulation.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Many more: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
I agree that we should be concerned about the issue of virtual slavery...
And not just because we ourselves may be AIs...
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is the same type of arrogance that has led engineers and physicists who have entered neuroscience to contribute almost nothing of significance to the field. They might think otherwise because they live in a bubble, but people in wet labs usually don't care or just ignore them. I recommend that you read a book about your average cell's intracellular machinery before making this kind of statements. The roadblock is complexity. First, we still don't understand how a single cell works as a whole. Second, we have no theories to deal with that level of complexity. I agree with the Human Brain Project's leaders that we have to start somewhere, but knowing that we know essentially nothing about most of the cells in the brain, I think that this is a project for next century. It is the opinion of most people in the field that this is just going to be an immense waste of money. This is not physics in the early 20th century, your model is only as good as your experimental data and it cannot be compared to the Human Genome Project or to the CERN where people essentially scaled up techniques that had been around for years or decades.
When I first saw:
What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain?
My first reaction was: And what if you wound up with the brain of a Hitler?
Let's call it GLaDOS.
It's entirely possible we might not need to delve too deep into the inner workings of neurons, glia and microtubules, if we manage to simulate the functional model of the neuron and how they form connections and interact with one another. I'm not saying it's 100% sure, but a good deal of neuroscientists seem to think cognition emerges from the connectone. If that is the case then this project might prove useful. If not, then it will still prove useful because it will certainly generate many new technologies and methodologies geared towards study of the brain.
Again with the "we don't understand" argument.
Isn't that the point of simulating complex systems? To gain understanding of them? Or are you suggesting that we only simulate systems that are well understood, not to understand them, but just for the fuck of it?
Why do we need theories to deal with that level of complexity? Do the laws of physics break down when there's a lot of particles to simulate? How is this not simply an issue of scaling up computing infrastructure to support simulations of larger data sets?
if you think we know essentially nothing about most of the cells in the brain, I find it odd that IBM has been simulating everything from neocortical columns to cat brains in-house. Perhaps you should drop them a line explaining to them that they don't know what they're doing.
Regarding "experimental data", I don't understand why we'd need anything more than an accurate map of the brain's structure, and an understanding of the laws of physics that govern the interaction between the brain's constituent particles. Perhaps you can explain to me why the laws of physics don't apply to the human brain?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
Consider how long it takes for the brain to trigger motor neurons, and the sensory neurons to pick up the effect and send this back to the brain. That gives a rough idea of how long their simulation can accurately model a real brain: the brain functions differently depending on its circumstances, and these need to be modelled accurately too if the overall results are to be meaningful. I doubt the amount of serious understanding resulting from this will be worth the effort invested.
John_Chalisque
You can copy something you don't understand. Copying can allow you to look at something more clearly.
How can you simulate something that you don't understand the slightest. I think there's no risk of creating skynet. ... one of their partners seems to be in the ocean), you cannot expect them to do a good job with mapping brain functionality :D
We'll see in a couple of years, yet I predict any attempt to simulate the brain will be a failure from this consortium of researchers.
Check out their promotion video especially 2:16 ff http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqMpGrM5ECo#t=2m16s
If they cannot even have a decent map of their partners ( Munich should be in Germany
And eventually destroy Humanity and the Human Race.
More irrational exuberance in the AI field! And as Douglas Hofstadter pointed out a couple of decades ago, if you could build a perfect simulation of a human brain, it would be subject to all the dumb biases and silly errors that the wetware version is. "Oh," you say, "we won't copy the brain exactly—we'll just keep the good parts!" Yeah, good luck with that. Will they invent digital Prozac to treat the brain with if it gets depressed? And someday they will have to realize that faster computers aren't the whole answer. The brain is actually a very slow computer—it's just very, very parallel. Something our computers still don't do very well.