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Mapping The Brain To Build Better Machines (quantamagazine.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quanta Magazine: An ambitious new program, funded by the federal government's intelligence arm, aims to bring artificial intelligence more in line with our own mental powers. Three teams composed of neuroscientists and computer scientists will attempt to figure out how the brain performs these feats of visual identification, then make machines that do the same. "Today's machine learning fails where humans excel," said Jacob Vogelstein, who heads the program at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). "We want to revolutionize machine learning by reverse engineering the algorithms and computations of the brain." By the end of the five-year IARPA project, dubbed Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (Microns), researchers aim to map a cubic millimeter of cortex. That tiny portion houses about 100,000 neurons, 3 to 15 million neuronal connections, or synapses, and enough neural wiring to span the width of Manhattan, were it all untangled and laid end-to-end.
This cargo-cult approach to AI is ridiculous. Decades of effort have produced absolutely no result. Oh, but this time we're way smarter and better informed, surely we'll produce something of value this time. Gimme the grant monies, plz.
Oh, but this one is worse. It's not that gigantic failure. The laughable failure they're repeating this time is far, far, older: "We want to revolutionize machine learning by reverse engineering the algorithms and computations of the brain."
Computationalism?! Seriously? Not only is that laughable, it's been laughable for ages! Don't think so? People have been born and died of old age waiting for that bit of fiction to produce any results. So far? Nothing. On top of it all, there's more than one good reason to suspect it's never going to produce any results.
Let's base one retarded idea on another retarded idea and mix in a bunch of childish thinking about the function of the brain based on zero evidence. AI breakthrough!
What is your approach to building a strong AI then? We are waiting for your reply.
In other news, the amount of progress into AI research depends on what fronts you judge the progress and there have been numerous steps forward but none of them have resulted in C3P0 style robots because that is not the goal.
There are functionalists who largely congregate at MIT and Harvard who do not believe that studying the human brain will yield any immediate results that can be implemented in silicon
There are the Cal tech researchers who are largely behavioralists who believe studying psychology and to a limited degree physiology will point the general direction in terms of large milestones that have to be achieved to build a strong AI, using nature as a guide.
Then there are the Connectionists and this includes Francois Crick, who believe that the neural connections as a functional network will yield a base cortical algorithm which can be applied to a number of things that also include the beginnings of building a Strong AI.
There are a lot of things that have been gained by these approaches to the problem so to say as you did that nothing has been accomplished is about as wrong as wrong can get. We know for instance, that the processing "program" of the human brain uses the same functional unit that is repeated over and over and is adapted and adaptable to vision processing, audio processing, kinesthetic processing and very likely (almost certainly) everything else in terms of recognizing adapting to and predicting (prediction is a strong indicator of intelligence among other behavioral emergent patterns) patterns and sequences of patterns between inputs and outputs. If you surgically connect auditory nerves to visual cortex the visual cortex adapts to process inputs from the eardrums, if you connect optic nerves to audio cortex, audio cortex processes visual information.. with no further manipulation.. that is quite a big value for "nothing being accomplished" as you put it.. Heres the kicker of how wrong you are:
A camera device has been developed that non-invasively communicates digital information as points of pressure onto the tongue of the wearer, thereby allowing a completely blind person to navigate and "see" through the camera via the sensation on the tongue. But no, we have not accomplished anything involving the understanding of how the brain processes information and yes we just should abandon this line of research because it will not accomplish anything at all.
You are right man, Deep Blue did not beat Kasparov and no IBM's Watson did not win against champion humans on Jeopardy.. so we might as well not even try.
Sheesh! Don't even bother to answer unless you have actual points to make with cited references.. go back to putzing around in Minecraft ok?