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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
Edit that original post before someone notices your euro to dollar conversion mistake and the dollar sign when mentioning euros.
"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
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 ?
it won't need to move a servo. it will zero your bank account, cancel your credit, tag you as needing palliative obamacare, and mark your license plates for arrest
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?
Exactly. I don't even think we quite understand how the brain does what it does enough to build a computer that does what it does. If we really understood how the brain worked, we wouldn't have people battling drug addiction or mental illnesses, because we would be able to fix their problems. Building a computer that operates even close to the capabilities of the human brain doesn't just require a faster computer. It requires algorithms that don't even exist yet. If they could actually build this computer, they would already have a working prototype that worked, but at a slower speed than the human brain.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
... simulate the complete human brain on supercomputers to better understand how it functions. The end hopes of the HBP include being able to mimic the human brain and being able to better diagnose human brain diseases and mental problems.
The confusion seems to have come from the Fox News article, the author mentions that the computer to simulate the human brain must be much more powerful than we currently have. But it's not supposed to be powerful because it's based on the human brain, it's supposed to be powerful to SIMULATE the brain.
He says a computer brain will consume gigawatts of power, require new forms of memory, and force scientists to look at cutting edge storage techniques. But the immense technical hurdles will be worth the effort. The first phases will help us understand how the brain functions. In later phases, we’ll find out how we learn, how we see and hear, and why the brain sometimes doesn’t process information correctly.
TLDR: they're building a supercomputer to model the human brain, not building a computer modeled on the human brain to be super.
According to this Computerworld article from 2008, a lot of that "steaming pile of 1980s-style AI" is in use every day.
I, for one, am looking forward to the payoff of this new, basic research 30 years from now.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
It'll take at least 3 decades before their artificial human brain is cost competitive with a human brain.
Except that the billion euros is the development cost, not the unit production cost. The development of the human brain took 4.5 billion years, and the resources of an entire planetary system, although there were some inefficiencies in the process.
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.
It's a pipe dream. Before you're going to build a computer that works like a human brain you're going to have to figure out how the human brain actually works. Neuroscientists aren't clueless, but they don't have very many clues. The science is in its infancy, and thinking you can replicate something you don't understand is the height of ignorant hubris.
Yes, you can easily program a computer to fool a human into thinking it thinks like a human. Trivially easy, humans are easy to fool. Just ask the Amazing Randi or David Copperfield; that's how IBM's Watson "thinks". Smoke and mirrors. A logic gate has no resemblance whatever to a neuron or axion, and an electronic bit has no analog to serotonin or other brain chemicals.
These folks are fools or charlatans or both.
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