Blue Brain Project attempts to simulate human brain
Using 1 processor per neuron, the folks at IBM, in partnership with the EPFL (a college in Switzerland) intend to simulate a brain component, the neocortical column "a cylindrical element about a third of a millimetre in diameter and three millimetres long, containing some 10,000 nerve cells. It is these columns, arranged side by side like the cells of a honeycomb, which make up the famous “grey matter” that has become a shorthand for human intelligence."
Should Moore's Law continue resolutely up the power law curve, Charles Peck, the leader of IBM's side of the collaboration, reckons it should be feasible to emulate an entire human brain in silico this way in ten to 15 years. (I guess I hadn't realized we were that close.) Of course, they mean that IBM will be able to afford to construct one, not that we will all have one on our desktop.
This should make Jeff Hawkins, author of On Intelligence, happy, since he posits in his book (if I recall) that these structures provide the recall-based, predictive source of our intelligence.
The article says that the most interesting questions "surely, are whether such an artificial brain will be intelligent, or conscious, or both." I guess I am more short-sighted -- the questions that interest me the most are ones like how you will boot such a brain -- will it be self-organizing? I don't think that our brain is entirely so -- surely most have accepted the idea that we aren't a blank slate. And even if and when we either correctly mimic the existing structures or design functional alternatives, other problems will arise. We know that real brains need constant stimulation to develop correctly -- how will they provide that to a massive computer locked in a building? After all, a child raised in a lab, without play or true "human" interaction would be severely disadvantaged if not retarded. (Perhaps a mobile "cute" point of presense to interact with the real world?) Should the inputs be imitations of ours -- artificial eyes/ears/touch? Or entirely novel inputs, like the stream of new pages posted to the Internet with interactions through chat rooms, online games and blogs?
Of course, lots of other questions come up -- can we still experiment on these brains when they get smart enough? What will this kind of power do to the field of AI and machine learning? I'm sure the science fiction authors are working on the solutions to some of these...
Should Moore's Law continue resolutely up the power law curve, Charles Peck, the leader of IBM's side of the collaboration, reckons it should be feasible to emulate an entire human brain in silico this way in ten to 15 years. (I guess I hadn't realized we were that close.) Of course, they mean that IBM will be able to afford to construct one, not that we will all have one on our desktop.
This should make Jeff Hawkins, author of On Intelligence, happy, since he posits in his book (if I recall) that these structures provide the recall-based, predictive source of our intelligence.
The article says that the most interesting questions "surely, are whether such an artificial brain will be intelligent, or conscious, or both." I guess I am more short-sighted -- the questions that interest me the most are ones like how you will boot such a brain -- will it be self-organizing? I don't think that our brain is entirely so -- surely most have accepted the idea that we aren't a blank slate. And even if and when we either correctly mimic the existing structures or design functional alternatives, other problems will arise. We know that real brains need constant stimulation to develop correctly -- how will they provide that to a massive computer locked in a building? After all, a child raised in a lab, without play or true "human" interaction would be severely disadvantaged if not retarded. (Perhaps a mobile "cute" point of presense to interact with the real world?) Should the inputs be imitations of ours -- artificial eyes/ears/touch? Or entirely novel inputs, like the stream of new pages posted to the Internet with interactions through chat rooms, online games and blogs?
Of course, lots of other questions come up -- can we still experiment on these brains when they get smart enough? What will this kind of power do to the field of AI and machine learning? I'm sure the science fiction authors are working on the solutions to some of these...
posted by Robert Rounthwaite at 11:44 AM
1 Comments:
Connect it to the internet.
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