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."

Sentient?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

If it works just like a human brain, at what point should it be considered to have the same rights as a human?

Re:Great

[CastrTroy]

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.

no wu, no win

[epine]

Unless this people building this system have come up with a way to program a creative spirit into the system, I'm skeptical

Daniel Dennett made himself a career out of arguing against this kind of twaddle. Whenever I listen to him, I always wonder what he's making such a big deal about, then I head back out into the world, and sure enough, he's busy saying what needs to be said.

From Daniel Dennett: 'You can make Aristotle look like a flaming idiot' [theguardian.com]:

There's a pattern here, "the story of my life", as Dennett puts it. People assume unrealistic ideals of what free will, selfhood or rationality are and then get upset when Dennett says: "It's not the overwhelming supercalifragilisticexpialidocious phenomenon that you thought it was." But it's still real enough. The problem is simply: "Both free will and consciousness have been, by my lights, inflated in the popular imagination and in the philosophical imagination," and so "anybody who has a view of either one that is chopped down to size" is accused of "a wretched subterfuge", as Kant memorably put it.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious travels under many aliases. One of these is "creative spirit". A calling card of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is that there can be no such thing as incremental progress. You either have it, or you're wasting your time. There's a grain of truth to this. It's hard to sneak up on a moving bar that travels by teleportation whenever encroached.

As I recall, Dennett goes into this in the last third of Daniel Dennett: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking [youtube.com]. It's a virtuous and mildly tedious sermon if you already belong to the choir.

Re:A computer that works like the human brain?

[alexgieg]

But there's only so much room.

But don't disregards algorithm improvements. Emulating a human brain provides as its best outcome the ability to study how cognition works and eventually deduce from the spaghetti code that constitutes us the fundamental laws of intelligence, emotions, sentiments etc. Once those are well understood and reworked into actually efficient code it's most probably going to be possible to run it in several orders of magnitude cheaper hardware.

Consider: the human brain currently has 100 billion networked neurons running at roughly 200 Hz each. That's a 20 THz total, or a mere 5k cores at current clock speeds, and probably much less considering automatic subconscious processes such as raw sensory data processing could be offloaded to specialized hardware or GPUs. Let's say that's 2k current-generation cores of actual CPU power for full cognition (and I bet I'm being conservative here). That's just about 10 more Moore's Law cycles before it fits your top of the line computer of the day, or something between 15 and 20 years.

Add to this the ability to tweak the cognitive code now that it's understood and thus to develop a mind super-focused and dedicated to improving AI theory itself, which in turn once implemented will do the same, rinse and repeat, and you'll have the Singularity in your hands.

We're living interesting times.

Re:A computer that works like the human brain?

[mcgrew]

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.