That is, uses a colloquial term for a female genitalia to describe something bad.
And for being unable to take a fucking joke, I call you a dick. That is, I use a colloquial term for a male genitalia to describe something bad. Am I a misandrist now?
I know this view is very unpopular with a large segment of the population, but I can't help but subscribe to it regardless.
There are people being tortured to death in Syria. There are people being tortured to death in Sudan. There are people being tortured [to death?] in American "detention centers". But American society today focuses on the injustice of virtual harassment online. Really?
I'm not suggesting that we can't worry about first world problems until we feed Africa or anything like that. I understand that different people have different priorities, and that's fine. I'm merely astounded by the level of offense some people can muster over relative nothings. Social justice warriors need to get some perspective.
Cause small pox blankets and genocide, killing off over 95% of the native population, that wasn't evil?
Okay, let's be honest here. While it's clear that the colonizing powers had a reckless disregard for the wellbeing of the native population, your smallpox blanket claim makes you sound like a lunatic.
Germ theory "was proposed in the mid-16th century and gained widespread credence when substantiated by scientific discoveries of the 17th through the late 19th century."
Handwashing was still laughed at in 1850. Germ theory as we now understand it wasn't around until Pasteur in the 1860s. Your claims of biological warfare during the colonial era fly in the face of reason. You should be ashamed of yourself for spreading misinformation.
Why do YOU people always leave out the militia part? A little inconvenient?? There is no militia now, so you don't need any guns.
I wouldn't expect someone participating in a gun-control discussion to be informed about reality, but according to the US federal law, there is a militia, even today. Of particular relevance here might be the part about the unorganized militia.
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard. (b) The classes of the militia are— (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
I'm in agreement that we have far too many laws and we can throw out most of the federal code of regulations. However, the Constitution is a pretty small, easy to read, reasonable document that has been ripped to shreds by attempts to interpret it with a context of the modern world. However, there is a convenient part built in that allows it to be modified. But long ago the government figured out it was far easier to ignore it than go through the modification process.
I feel that we need to repeal the second amendment, and I say this as a gun-owner. The text of the amendment clearly prevents the government from restricting access even to nuclear arms, which most people would agree is not optimal. Our government has taken the expedient approach and simply ignored (sorry, "interpreted") the second amendment and passed legislation that infringes upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms. While this solves the problem of NBC proliferation, it introduces the problem of law-ignoring government. It would be nice if more people saw things your way -- maybe then we'd finally see people support repealing the second amendment and replacing it with something that is more in line with existing legislation that [rightly] restricts arms.
(By the way, I'm actually in favor of much greater regulations on guns, perhaps even beyond what the 2nd amendment implies. But I refuse to twist the meaning of this sentence to accord with my personal belief.)
Thank you for demonstrating how a reasonable person ought to approach this issue. Thank you many times over.
I grant that the analogy is far from perfect and depends on many probably-flawed assumptions. While I wasn't suggesting that the only alternative was to halt everything, I think about this subject in the context of "which approach is most likely to yield a virtual human brain soonest". Looking at [what I call] the brute-force approach of understanding how neurons work, understanding how neurons are interconnected, and simulating them, it seems like this ought to be possible in a few decades, maybe even in a century, with only incremental progress and no expectation of revolutionary discovery. Looking at the "let's understand what 'intelligence' really is before we go trying to simulate it" approach, how do you even form an estimate? Inherently, this approach does rely on some revolutionary discovery being made. Perhaps it's just me being a pessimist, but I don't believe we'll ever have an answer for that (forever is a long time, but I say "we" meaning humans-as-they-exist-today), let alone within the next century. While I don't dismiss the value of seeking to gain a fundamental understanding of intelligence, I don't think the goal itself is attainable -- how can we hope to understand something that is many orders of magnitude more complex than anything we've managed to understand before?
But C. Elegans? with only 300 neurons, 7000 synapses? That's old news (though still not quite "complete" in some sense). Though we don't yet have a complete connectome for D melanogaster (it's in the works [sorry for the shitty citation]) nor a complete model for its neurons, but simulation work on its 100000 node CNS is underway regardless. Obviously we won't see virtual flies until this connectome is fully diagrammed and more experimental data about the neurons is available and computers get a bit faster, so indeed it is true that it is too soon to expect these projects to be fully completed. Probably much too soon. But that doesn't mean it's too soon to start, and $0.5B is peanuts when you consider how much a truly successful simulation project is likely to cost.
It's not just the compute power that's a serious limiting factor, but also the availability of imaging technology that would enable us to develop a complete connectome for the brains we seek to simulate. The most immediate hurdle for projects like these isn't our lack of fundamental understanding (although to say that such understanding "would help" would be a huge understatement), it's the combination of insufficient computing resources (though if past trends continue, this won't be an issue for long) combined with insufficient knowledge of the brain's structure (which can be remedied by continuing to advance the state of medical imaging technology, and dfMRI seems very promising recently). Getting more experimental data to develop accurate neuron models for various animals is simply labor-intensive and not really waiting on anything except more funding. However, these are well-defined engineering or funding problems, and steady incremental progress is being made on all of these fronts. I expected this infusion of $0.5B to simply help that along.
We have the technology to invasively/destructively map brains and develop accurate neuronal models today. We have the technology to simulate interconnected neurons today. Progress will continue, but only at the rate at which we fund improvements in these underlying technologies as well as projects that seek to pull together these technologies to shoot for ambitious brain simulations. While I don't doubt that there are other worthy causes to spend this money on (even within neuroscience), I think it's still unfortunate if this particular approach doesn't get the green light because of the actions of one seemingly power-hungry individual.
That's a very tough row to hoe, very slow progress.
And yet, with the hindsight that we have today, can you say that we likely would've more quickly progressed to the point of steelmaking by, instead of blindly experimenting, waiting until sufficient understanding of chemistry was achieved? I don't. I think that the absence of metal tools would've delayed scientific progress, pushing back the date at which we really understood how steel works (which itself was preceded by the first development of steel either way). It's unlikely that an absence of metal tools would've actually increased the rate of scientific discovery, in my opinion.
We would be in the same position if we're just fiddling with some brain model. Brains are also a LOT more complex than steel, so I'm not even sure how much progress we would make.
We're also a lot smarter than people throwing arbitrary rocks into campfires. It's a challenging comparison to make accurately.
I'm not sanguine about the value of the results. Brains are horribly complex things, and without understanding how they relate to the minds they embody we have no way of 'creating a research team' of such artificial minds.
The context here was your previous hypothetical situation: "Yes, but what you fail to understand is these "emergent properties" would be what? Intelligence? Suppose you simulated a human brain and it talked to you intelligently." -- presumably, if a simulated human brain talked to me intelligently, it would be capable of talking to other simulated human brains intelligently. Admittedly, we're in some rather out-there territory at this point, with hypotheticals predicated upon hypotheticals. I'm not suggesting that this is the necessary outcome here, merely a possible one. A possible one that would unquestionably justify this sort of endeavor if realized.
I'd say we'd have a HUGE challenge just creating a simulation so perfect it worked at all.
Agreed wholeheartedly. But this goal can be reached iteratively, and we've already been making tremendous progress at smaller scales. From early, limited simulations of individual neurons which matured to be 'perfect' in many ways, to current larger-scale simulations of neural columns whose behavior also correspond rather well to that of biological ones, we're making progress. Markram's idea may (or may not) be being pursued too soon, in that we may need to work on perfecting simulation of "larger than neural column, smaller than whole human brain" neural structures, but that's not clear to me.
Any small problem at the brain level could create a catastrophically disordered mind, but you'd have no way of knowing how to fix it without any conceptual framework.
A valid point. Much like early steelworkers' ignorance of the actual chemical processes involved in their work prevented them from having any way of knowing how to fix a broken process, this would similarly be a hindrance to researchers in this field. If it works, it works, and if it doesn't, you have no informed way of doing anything about it. Quite a departure from science, I admit.
Beyond that, most of the most high-value potential uses of AI are likely to be highly specialized niche applications which won't benefit that much from emulations of humans (or rats, etc for that matter).
Ah, but that's AI, and AI is a very broad field rife with niche applications:P I'd argue (as someone who develops machine learning systems for a living) that a simulated brain would be categorically different than what AI researchers are interested in. It doesn't lead to a model of cognition, it doesn't lead to an understanding of intelligence, it doesn't really advance scientific knowledge at all. It's more of an engineering project than a science project.
Emulations of some of the low-level neural circuitry I can
To be clear, what I think is that you have to develop conceptual models, not just simulations. If all you did was literally make a neuron simulation and wire a huge number of them together you would learn what? Nothing much really, because you'd then have the same questions about how that simulation works that you have about how a real brain works. What we need are the equivalent of Kirchhoff's Laws and Ohm's Law, etc for neurology.
If your goal is to gain a fundamental understanding of how the brain works, I agree. If your goals are to simply duplicate the functional properties of a human brain, I disagree.
Much like we didn't need to gain a fundamental understanding of materials science or chemistry (or even a table of elements) to develop bronzeworking, ironworking, even steelworking (which are practically valuable in their own right, even without any deeper understanding of the how or why) it's entirely plausible that we don't necessarily need to gain any fundamental understanding of the human brain in order to extract practical value from constructing simulated brains. In the aforementioned example of metallurgy, the cart did precede the horse, in that we were making valuable things long before we ever understood how or why these valuable things worked, and I don't think any reasonable people are saying that we should've abstained from developing these technologies until we first gained a fundamental understanding of the nature of matter.
My personal opinion is that an overall framework goal of reproducing the behavior of very large sets of neurons (IE on the scale of mammalian brains) might not be a bad direction to take, but we're probably not going to succeed without developing these generalizations and using them to construct less detailed models which still perform in 'brain-like' ways that we can use as I've stipulated above. And it may well be that the low-level simulation approach simply isn't the most efficient way to get there. Maybe there are higher level neurological functional units that we can abstract, but we don't have a good understanding of what those might be yet. Maybe small-scale neuron-level simulation is the way to gain THAT understanding too, but I'm certainly not the person to even have an opinion on that.
These are all reasonable, valid points. Going back to my previous analogy, it also would also have seemed reasonable for people to wait until our understanding of metals was more fully developed before trying arbitrary combinations of materials just to see what the result would be. Think about how wasteful that must have been, about the level of resources squandered on these early metallurgical forays that led nowhere. I imagine the alchemists of that era were incensed about this waste, thinking that spending resources on gaining a fundamental understanding of matter would be much more wise than mindlessly trying things out just to see what the end products would be. After all, even if the end products turned out to be valuable, we still wouldn't have really learned anything about how they work or why they work they way they do! However, it was many centuries or millennia before a thorough understanding of chemistry was developed, and indeed, much of the research that provided this understanding was itself dependent on the existence of metal tools. Without our unscientifically-developed metallurgical technology, it's not clear that we'd have developed this level of understanding in the same time frame, or even by today.
In much the same way, I propose that there is potential value in Markram's 'hail mary' approach, not because it might help us gain understanding into how the brain works (in the same way that developing steel didn't directly help us understand the myriad relationships between iron and carbon), but merely because it might yield a new technology which could help us in novel and unforeseen ways. Perhaps the creation of virtual human brains (again, without unders
Yes, but what you fail to understand is these "emergent properties" would be what? Intelligence? Suppose you simulated a human brain and it talked to you intelligently. What have you learned about intelligence that you can't learn from talking to me?
Nothing.
The learning process involves the ability to analyze and control your simulation, not just to make it.
This statement is misleading on account of its overly narrow scope. From the abacus all the way to the integrated circuit, we've been simulating (at a very low level of fidelity) some subset of the human brain for ages. The goal has never been to learn how the human brain does math, for example, but instead to augment natural human mental abilities. Gaining an understanding of the human brain is not the only valid goal to chase after, as it is evident that the pursuit of better computational technology has, in practice, proved to be very beneficial to the human race.
Simulating an entire brain by 'brute force'? I don't see any inherent value in that at all.
So you see no value in potentially creating virtual rational agents? Ones that could enable universal automata, androids, etc.? No value at all?
I think the problem is Markram seems fixated on this 'whole brain' part of the question and he's just either not expressing or genuinely not understanding the perspective I'm putting forward.
I think the fact that Markram is fixated on this 'whole brain' part of the question isn't a problem. It's evident that his goals are orthogonal to yours, but it would be no less wrong to say that your focus on a 'partial brain' is some sort of problem. Different goals, different approaches. I don't see either goal as inherently more objectively valid.
The neuroscience community generally seems to believe that we have to approach this all bottom up, that we need to parameterize the processes of mental function and model them as abstract systems in order to really understand them. This seems to be very different from Markram's vision and its not clear that his approach is really valid.
The neuroscience community doesn't have one single unifying goal, and the fact that there are multiple competing visions underscores that fact. It's entirely likely that any given vision will not fulfill everyone's disparate goals, but no reasonable person would expect that. Do you expect a bottom-up approach is likely to enable the creation of virtual humans any time soon? If not, then why isn't your approach also "invalid"? After all, it's about as likely to bring us functioning virtual brains as Markram's approach is to bring us any meaningful understanding of how the brain works.
If you end up with a simulation that is as hard to understand as the actual brain, what have you gained?
Determining the presence/absence of interesting emergent properties alone would be invaluable.
The value MUST all be in the process, not the result, so why fix now on one specific result which may not prove to be the best choice?
See, this is where I disagree entirely. There are those who seek to gain some fundamental understanding of the brain, and then there are those who believe that a brute-force approach to simulating the brain might lead to the creation of virtual brains with emergent properties similar to those observed in biological brains. I fall into the latter camp. I just want to see what happens.
Granted, I can see why people might take issue with a $1.3B project that amounts to "let's just do something ridiculous and see what happens!"
So, basically, management issues, not technical ones?
Personally, I'm eager to see what happens with a brute-force approach to simulating a human brain, and I thought that was the sole goal of HBP. If it's being turned into a project developing technological support and software/hardware infrastructure to support neuroscience research, I'm definitely disappointed. While I'm sure that's a worthwhile endeavor also, I also suspect that there's lots of other people contributing towards that type of work also. I don't know of any other team seeking to simulate a whole brain, though.
It's unfortunate that one man's ego could derail an endeavor as fantastic as this. I hope the committee that Markram is replaced with doesn't abandon this opportunity for a moon shot, as I don't know if the will for creating another opportunity like this will exist any time soon. It's not every day that $1.3B of public funding gets dumped into brain simulation.
I'm fascinated by this field of research but haven't been keeping up. News of HBP crashing and burning right now is indeed news to me. Aside from the objections from the computational neuroscience crowd (that I would summarize as "we don't fully understand the brain yet, so simulating it to gain a better understanding doesn't make any sense!") and Markram's unwillingness to entertain that claim, is there anything actually wrong with it?
Also, all of you idiots posting about Mars One are just that: idiots. We're supposed to be asking him about colonizing mars, not about reality TV shows.
Decades ago, Jerome Pearson produced detailed plans for a lunar space elevator for NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts, seeking to enable lunar mining and lower-cost access to water in space.
Since any human missions to Mars would benefit from (if not outright require) large amounts of water (either split into propellent and oxidizer, used as radiation shielding, or even just for life support), do you feel that construction of such a device would be a net benefit? Why or why not?
Seriously. Slashdot is broken. On Android, the fucking story section icon and comment count have been rendering over the top of the headline recently. Does anyone even beta test this shit? (Also, apologies for using the word beta. Fuck beta.)
I know, right? God forbid we have to flee and look like wimps. Much better to take a man's life.
According to Wilson's account, he was not in his car when the fatal shot was fired. In fact, when the fatal shot was fired, Brown had already been wounded numerous times. It seems unlikely to me that Brown was still posing a threat to Wilson's life at this point (as Wilson had numerous avenues for escape and Brown already had a few holes in him), but for some reason nobody is questioning why Officer Wilson felt he had no other option than to kill Brown.
I suppose machismo is a valid defense in our society. Wonderful.
Multiple witnesses (including half a dozen African Americans who came forward on their own to the police, and weren't interested in media attention) corroborated all of this, including what happened next (Brown turns around and moves at Wilson, who fires a few times, winging Brown - Wilson STOPS shooting and again tells Brown to stop - Brown then charges at Wilson who shoots again until Brown stops). There's blood on the street that shows Brown covered significant distance TOWARDS Wilson, just as described by those same witnesses.
Based on my understanding of the prosecutor's statement to the news media, the fatal shots were fired quite a distance from the patrol car. Wilson had allegedly pursued Brown for some distance before Brown allegedly turned to charge at Wilson. My question is, was shooting Brown to death Wilson's only option? Was he for some reason unable to flee the allegedly aggressive Brown? What about after he had already succeeded in shooting him, and Brown still allegedly made some sudden movements toward Wilson, was Wilson's only option to continue shooting at Brown? Was this shot-and-bleeding-on-the-ground Brown still posing an immediate threat to the life of Wilson or someone else? If not, why was it legal for him to continue shooting? Is there some authority vested in law enforcement officers that allows them to shoot to death anyone that seeks to do harm, regardless of their actual means to accomplish this goal? If a five-year-old chases after a cop trying to kick him in the shin, does the cop have the authority to shoot him? If not, then why is this any different if it's a gunshot victim crawling across the pavement instead of a five-year-old running? Doesn't each pose an equally insignificant threat?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hopeful that one day this trope will be as unfashionable as the ones about women.
I'm hopeful that one day people will go back to a pre-1980 usage (or lack thereof) of the word "trope". Here's a helpful graph.
Seriously. The 2010s will be remembered as the decade of the war on tropes. Trope.
That is, uses a colloquial term for a female genitalia to describe something bad.
And for being unable to take a fucking joke, I call you a dick. That is, I use a colloquial term for a male genitalia to describe something bad. Am I a misandrist now?
I know this view is very unpopular with a large segment of the population, but I can't help but subscribe to it regardless.
There are people being tortured to death in Syria. There are people being tortured to death in Sudan. There are people being tortured [to death?] in American "detention centers". But American society today focuses on the injustice of virtual harassment online. Really?
I'm not suggesting that we can't worry about first world problems until we feed Africa or anything like that. I understand that different people have different priorities, and that's fine. I'm merely astounded by the level of offense some people can muster over relative nothings. Social justice warriors need to get some perspective.
Cause small pox blankets and genocide, killing off over 95% of the native population, that wasn't evil?
Okay, let's be honest here. While it's clear that the colonizing powers had a reckless disregard for the wellbeing of the native population, your smallpox blanket claim makes you sound like a lunatic.
Germ theory "was proposed in the mid-16th century and gained widespread credence when substantiated by scientific discoveries of the 17th through the late 19th century."
Handwashing was still laughed at in 1850. Germ theory as we now understand it wasn't around until Pasteur in the 1860s. Your claims of biological warfare during the colonial era fly in the face of reason. You should be ashamed of yourself for spreading misinformation.
tail, v., to follow and observe closely.
By approaching and circling the aerostat, the F-16 fighter jets are tailing it.
Only on slashdot would someone turn this into a physics problem.
i take it you've never lived under the protection of one in a combat zone.
Is that because JLENS has never been deployed to a combat zone (mostly because it was designed to operate in friendly territory)?
They know where it is. There are two F-16 fighter jets tailing it. There are better articles online than the one linked in TFS.
Wouldn't that be n/t/b then?
Why do YOU people always leave out the militia part? A little inconvenient?? There is no militia now, so you don't need any guns.
I wouldn't expect someone participating in a gun-control discussion to be informed about reality, but according to the US federal law, there is a militia, even today. Of particular relevance here might be the part about the unorganized militia.
10 U.S. Code 311 - Militia: composition and classes
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
(b) The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
I'm in agreement that we have far too many laws and we can throw out most of the federal code of regulations. However, the Constitution is a pretty small, easy to read, reasonable document that has been ripped to shreds by attempts to interpret it with a context of the modern world. However, there is a convenient part built in that allows it to be modified. But long ago the government figured out it was far easier to ignore it than go through the modification process.
I feel that we need to repeal the second amendment, and I say this as a gun-owner. The text of the amendment clearly prevents the government from restricting access even to nuclear arms, which most people would agree is not optimal. Our government has taken the expedient approach and simply ignored (sorry, "interpreted") the second amendment and passed legislation that infringes upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms. While this solves the problem of NBC proliferation, it introduces the problem of law-ignoring government. It would be nice if more people saw things your way -- maybe then we'd finally see people support repealing the second amendment and replacing it with something that is more in line with existing legislation that [rightly] restricts arms.
(By the way, I'm actually in favor of much greater regulations on guns, perhaps even beyond what the 2nd amendment implies. But I refuse to twist the meaning of this sentence to accord with my personal belief.)
Thank you for demonstrating how a reasonable person ought to approach this issue. Thank you many times over.
I grant that the analogy is far from perfect and depends on many probably-flawed assumptions. While I wasn't suggesting that the only alternative was to halt everything, I think about this subject in the context of "which approach is most likely to yield a virtual human brain soonest". Looking at [what I call] the brute-force approach of understanding how neurons work, understanding how neurons are interconnected, and simulating them, it seems like this ought to be possible in a few decades, maybe even in a century, with only incremental progress and no expectation of revolutionary discovery. Looking at the "let's understand what 'intelligence' really is before we go trying to simulate it" approach, how do you even form an estimate? Inherently, this approach does rely on some revolutionary discovery being made. Perhaps it's just me being a pessimist, but I don't believe we'll ever have an answer for that (forever is a long time, but I say "we" meaning humans-as-they-exist-today), let alone within the next century. While I don't dismiss the value of seeking to gain a fundamental understanding of intelligence, I don't think the goal itself is attainable -- how can we hope to understand something that is many orders of magnitude more complex than anything we've managed to understand before?
But C. Elegans? with only 300 neurons, 7000 synapses? That's old news (though still not quite "complete" in some sense). Though we don't yet have a complete connectome for D melanogaster (it's in the works [sorry for the shitty citation]) nor a complete model for its neurons, but simulation work on its 100000 node CNS is underway regardless. Obviously we won't see virtual flies until this connectome is fully diagrammed and more experimental data about the neurons is available and computers get a bit faster, so indeed it is true that it is too soon to expect these projects to be fully completed. Probably much too soon. But that doesn't mean it's too soon to start, and $0.5B is peanuts when you consider how much a truly successful simulation project is likely to cost.
It's not just the compute power that's a serious limiting factor, but also the availability of imaging technology that would enable us to develop a complete connectome for the brains we seek to simulate. The most immediate hurdle for projects like these isn't our lack of fundamental understanding (although to say that such understanding "would help" would be a huge understatement), it's the combination of insufficient computing resources (though if past trends continue, this won't be an issue for long) combined with insufficient knowledge of the brain's structure (which can be remedied by continuing to advance the state of medical imaging technology, and dfMRI seems very promising recently). Getting more experimental data to develop accurate neuron models for various animals is simply labor-intensive and not really waiting on anything except more funding. However, these are well-defined engineering or funding problems, and steady incremental progress is being made on all of these fronts. I expected this infusion of $0.5B to simply help that along.
We have the technology to invasively/destructively map brains and develop accurate neuronal models today. We have the technology to simulate interconnected neurons today. Progress will continue, but only at the rate at which we fund improvements in these underlying technologies as well as projects that seek to pull together these technologies to shoot for ambitious brain simulations. While I don't doubt that there are other worthy causes to spend this money on (even within neuroscience), I think it's still unfortunate if this particular approach doesn't get the green light because of the actions of one seemingly power-hungry individual.
That's a very tough row to hoe, very slow progress.
And yet, with the hindsight that we have today, can you say that we likely would've more quickly progressed to the point of steelmaking by, instead of blindly experimenting, waiting until sufficient understanding of chemistry was achieved? I don't. I think that the absence of metal tools would've delayed scientific progress, pushing back the date at which we really understood how steel works (which itself was preceded by the first development of steel either way). It's unlikely that an absence of metal tools would've actually increased the rate of scientific discovery, in my opinion.
We would be in the same position if we're just fiddling with some brain model. Brains are also a LOT more complex than steel, so I'm not even sure how much progress we would make.
We're also a lot smarter than people throwing arbitrary rocks into campfires. It's a challenging comparison to make accurately.
I'm not sanguine about the value of the results. Brains are horribly complex things, and without understanding how they relate to the minds they embody we have no way of 'creating a research team' of such artificial minds.
The context here was your previous hypothetical situation: "Yes, but what you fail to understand is these "emergent properties" would be what? Intelligence? Suppose you simulated a human brain and it talked to you intelligently." -- presumably, if a simulated human brain talked to me intelligently, it would be capable of talking to other simulated human brains intelligently. Admittedly, we're in some rather out-there territory at this point, with hypotheticals predicated upon hypotheticals. I'm not suggesting that this is the necessary outcome here, merely a possible one. A possible one that would unquestionably justify this sort of endeavor if realized.
I'd say we'd have a HUGE challenge just creating a simulation so perfect it worked at all.
Agreed wholeheartedly. But this goal can be reached iteratively, and we've already been making tremendous progress at smaller scales. From early, limited simulations of individual neurons which matured to be 'perfect' in many ways, to current larger-scale simulations of neural columns whose behavior also correspond rather well to that of biological ones, we're making progress. Markram's idea may (or may not) be being pursued too soon, in that we may need to work on perfecting simulation of "larger than neural column, smaller than whole human brain" neural structures, but that's not clear to me.
Any small problem at the brain level could create a catastrophically disordered mind, but you'd have no way of knowing how to fix it without any conceptual framework.
A valid point. Much like early steelworkers' ignorance of the actual chemical processes involved in their work prevented them from having any way of knowing how to fix a broken process, this would similarly be a hindrance to researchers in this field. If it works, it works, and if it doesn't, you have no informed way of doing anything about it. Quite a departure from science, I admit.
Beyond that, most of the most high-value potential uses of AI are likely to be highly specialized niche applications which won't benefit that much from emulations of humans (or rats, etc for that matter).
Ah, but that's AI, and AI is a very broad field rife with niche applications :P I'd argue (as someone who develops machine learning systems for a living) that a simulated brain would be categorically different than what AI researchers are interested in. It doesn't lead to a model of cognition, it doesn't lead to an understanding of intelligence, it doesn't really advance scientific knowledge at all. It's more of an engineering project than a science project.
Emulations of some of the low-level neural circuitry I can
To be clear, what I think is that you have to develop conceptual models, not just simulations. If all you did was literally make a neuron simulation and wire a huge number of them together you would learn what? Nothing much really, because you'd then have the same questions about how that simulation works that you have about how a real brain works. What we need are the equivalent of Kirchhoff's Laws and Ohm's Law, etc for neurology.
If your goal is to gain a fundamental understanding of how the brain works, I agree. If your goals are to simply duplicate the functional properties of a human brain, I disagree.
Much like we didn't need to gain a fundamental understanding of materials science or chemistry (or even a table of elements) to develop bronzeworking, ironworking, even steelworking (which are practically valuable in their own right, even without any deeper understanding of the how or why) it's entirely plausible that we don't necessarily need to gain any fundamental understanding of the human brain in order to extract practical value from constructing simulated brains. In the aforementioned example of metallurgy, the cart did precede the horse, in that we were making valuable things long before we ever understood how or why these valuable things worked, and I don't think any reasonable people are saying that we should've abstained from developing these technologies until we first gained a fundamental understanding of the nature of matter.
My personal opinion is that an overall framework goal of reproducing the behavior of very large sets of neurons (IE on the scale of mammalian brains) might not be a bad direction to take, but we're probably not going to succeed without developing these generalizations and using them to construct less detailed models which still perform in 'brain-like' ways that we can use as I've stipulated above. And it may well be that the low-level simulation approach simply isn't the most efficient way to get there. Maybe there are higher level neurological functional units that we can abstract, but we don't have a good understanding of what those might be yet. Maybe small-scale neuron-level simulation is the way to gain THAT understanding too, but I'm certainly not the person to even have an opinion on that.
These are all reasonable, valid points. Going back to my previous analogy, it also would also have seemed reasonable for people to wait until our understanding of metals was more fully developed before trying arbitrary combinations of materials just to see what the result would be. Think about how wasteful that must have been, about the level of resources squandered on these early metallurgical forays that led nowhere. I imagine the alchemists of that era were incensed about this waste, thinking that spending resources on gaining a fundamental understanding of matter would be much more wise than mindlessly trying things out just to see what the end products would be. After all, even if the end products turned out to be valuable, we still wouldn't have really learned anything about how they work or why they work they way they do! However, it was many centuries or millennia before a thorough understanding of chemistry was developed, and indeed, much of the research that provided this understanding was itself dependent on the existence of metal tools. Without our unscientifically-developed metallurgical technology, it's not clear that we'd have developed this level of understanding in the same time frame, or even by today.
In much the same way, I propose that there is potential value in Markram's 'hail mary' approach, not because it might help us gain understanding into how the brain works (in the same way that developing steel didn't directly help us understand the myriad relationships between iron and carbon), but merely because it might yield a new technology which could help us in novel and unforeseen ways. Perhaps the creation of virtual human brains (again, without unders
Yes, but what you fail to understand is these "emergent properties" would be what? Intelligence? Suppose you simulated a human brain and it talked to you intelligently. What have you learned about intelligence that you can't learn from talking to me?
Nothing.
The learning process involves the ability to analyze and control your simulation, not just to make it.
This statement is misleading on account of its overly narrow scope. From the abacus all the way to the integrated circuit, we've been simulating (at a very low level of fidelity) some subset of the human brain for ages. The goal has never been to learn how the human brain does math, for example, but instead to augment natural human mental abilities. Gaining an understanding of the human brain is not the only valid goal to chase after, as it is evident that the pursuit of better computational technology has, in practice, proved to be very beneficial to the human race.
Simulating an entire brain by 'brute force'? I don't see any inherent value in that at all.
So you see no value in potentially creating virtual rational agents? Ones that could enable universal automata, androids, etc.? No value at all?
I think the problem is Markram seems fixated on this 'whole brain' part of the question and he's just either not expressing or genuinely not understanding the perspective I'm putting forward.
I think the fact that Markram is fixated on this 'whole brain' part of the question isn't a problem. It's evident that his goals are orthogonal to yours, but it would be no less wrong to say that your focus on a 'partial brain' is some sort of problem. Different goals, different approaches. I don't see either goal as inherently more objectively valid.
The neuroscience community generally seems to believe that we have to approach this all bottom up, that we need to parameterize the processes of mental function and model them as abstract systems in order to really understand them. This seems to be very different from Markram's vision and its not clear that his approach is really valid.
The neuroscience community doesn't have one single unifying goal, and the fact that there are multiple competing visions underscores that fact. It's entirely likely that any given vision will not fulfill everyone's disparate goals, but no reasonable person would expect that. Do you expect a bottom-up approach is likely to enable the creation of virtual humans any time soon? If not, then why isn't your approach also "invalid"? After all, it's about as likely to bring us functioning virtual brains as Markram's approach is to bring us any meaningful understanding of how the brain works.
If you end up with a simulation that is as hard to understand as the actual brain, what have you gained?
Determining the presence/absence of interesting emergent properties alone would be invaluable.
The value MUST all be in the process, not the result, so why fix now on one specific result which may not prove to be the best choice?
See, this is where I disagree entirely. There are those who seek to gain some fundamental understanding of the brain, and then there are those who believe that a brute-force approach to simulating the brain might lead to the creation of virtual brains with emergent properties similar to those observed in biological brains. I fall into the latter camp. I just want to see what happens.
Granted, I can see why people might take issue with a $1.3B project that amounts to "let's just do something ridiculous and see what happens!"
So, basically, management issues, not technical ones?
Personally, I'm eager to see what happens with a brute-force approach to simulating a human brain, and I thought that was the sole goal of HBP. If it's being turned into a project developing technological support and software/hardware infrastructure to support neuroscience research, I'm definitely disappointed. While I'm sure that's a worthwhile endeavor also, I also suspect that there's lots of other people contributing towards that type of work also. I don't know of any other team seeking to simulate a whole brain, though.
It's unfortunate that one man's ego could derail an endeavor as fantastic as this. I hope the committee that Markram is replaced with doesn't abandon this opportunity for a moon shot, as I don't know if the will for creating another opportunity like this will exist any time soon. It's not every day that $1.3B of public funding gets dumped into brain simulation.
I'm fascinated by this field of research but haven't been keeping up. News of HBP crashing and burning right now is indeed news to me. Aside from the objections from the computational neuroscience crowd (that I would summarize as "we don't fully understand the brain yet, so simulating it to gain a better understanding doesn't make any sense!") and Markram's unwillingness to entertain that claim, is there anything actually wrong with it?
Also, all of you idiots posting about Mars One are just that: idiots. We're supposed to be asking him about colonizing mars, not about reality TV shows.
Decades ago, Jerome Pearson produced detailed plans for a lunar space elevator for NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts, seeking to enable lunar mining and lower-cost access to water in space.
Since any human missions to Mars would benefit from (if not outright require) large amounts of water (either split into propellent and oxidizer, used as radiation shielding, or even just for life support), do you feel that construction of such a device would be a net benefit? Why or why not?
Seriously. Slashdot is broken. On Android, the fucking story section icon and comment count have been rendering over the top of the headline recently. Does anyone even beta test this shit? (Also, apologies for using the word beta. Fuck beta.)
I logged in for the first time in weeks to post this:
Thank you. That was great. I don't have any mod points, but this was the most offtopic thread I've seen in a while. I'm still laughing a bit.
They do have to share that with your lawyer, but it is up to your lawyer to bring up the evidence which exonerates you.
My understanding is that what you say cannot be used for you, as it would be hearsay, and is thus inadmissible in court.
IANAL.
I would have shot him as well
I know, right? God forbid we have to flee and look like wimps. Much better to take a man's life.
According to Wilson's account, he was not in his car when the fatal shot was fired. In fact, when the fatal shot was fired, Brown had already been wounded numerous times. It seems unlikely to me that Brown was still posing a threat to Wilson's life at this point (as Wilson had numerous avenues for escape and Brown already had a few holes in him), but for some reason nobody is questioning why Officer Wilson felt he had no other option than to kill Brown.
I suppose machismo is a valid defense in our society. Wonderful.
Multiple witnesses (including half a dozen African Americans who came forward on their own to the police, and weren't interested in media attention) corroborated all of this, including what happened next (Brown turns around and moves at Wilson, who fires a few times, winging Brown - Wilson STOPS shooting and again tells Brown to stop - Brown then charges at Wilson who shoots again until Brown stops). There's blood on the street that shows Brown covered significant distance TOWARDS Wilson, just as described by those same witnesses.
Based on my understanding of the prosecutor's statement to the news media, the fatal shots were fired quite a distance from the patrol car. Wilson had allegedly pursued Brown for some distance before Brown allegedly turned to charge at Wilson. My question is, was shooting Brown to death Wilson's only option? Was he for some reason unable to flee the allegedly aggressive Brown? What about after he had already succeeded in shooting him, and Brown still allegedly made some sudden movements toward Wilson, was Wilson's only option to continue shooting at Brown? Was this shot-and-bleeding-on-the-ground Brown still posing an immediate threat to the life of Wilson or someone else? If not, why was it legal for him to continue shooting? Is there some authority vested in law enforcement officers that allows them to shoot to death anyone that seeks to do harm, regardless of their actual means to accomplish this goal? If a five-year-old chases after a cop trying to kick him in the shin, does the cop have the authority to shoot him? If not, then why is this any different if it's a gunshot victim crawling across the pavement instead of a five-year-old running? Doesn't each pose an equally insignificant threat?