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Mapping The Brain To Build Better Machines (quantamagazine.org)

Posted by BeauHD on from the government-funded-projects dept.

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.

3 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Pure delusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Pure delusion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Cynicism isn't productive

      Neither is computationalism. It's like saying they're going to crack strong AI through phrenology.

      or warranted.

      Oh, I'd say it's warranted. What other reaction could a reasonable person have to this? Imagine if someone announced that they're going to make significant advances in perpetual motion thanks to phlogiston theory. That's exactly what this sounds like to anyone who isn't a Kurzweil cultist.

      Here's a neat idea. Let's let go of old, long disproved, ideas and try something new. The alternative, after all, is to keep carefully adjusting the weights on your unbalanced wheel hoping that some day it'll spin in perpetuity.

  2. Why not use bleach and a light microscope? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's a better way to do it, and it could potentially image the whole brain, all at once. It can image whole brains of mice and other smaller mammals at the neuronal level, and we can tag each type of brain cell automatically.

    Once you've got the raw data a simple AI program could map the structure logically by recognizing the tracers and plotting the connections...

    Of course, this cheap and simple method may not put money in the right pockets. See what I'm thinking?