The Human Brain Project Kicks Off 251
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."
Conversion? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Whoops, billion.
I think you meant: $1.3 billion. Wow! Something is going on here, $13 billion damnit!
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Whats wrong with you, the new official Bitcoin comparison rate is measured in "RWU's" or long hand "Ross William Ulbricht's" @ a rate of 1:$80 Million US.
So thats 169.625 RWU's
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Whats wrong with you, the new official Bitcoin comparison rate is measured in "RWU's" or long hand "Ross William Ulbricht's" @ a rate of 1:$80 Million US.
So thats 169.625 RWU's
Thank you. So how many Library of Congress units does that purchase?
@$629.2 Million for the running costs in 2011 [loc.gov] Thats about 21.567 years worth of operating costs unadjusted.
Skynet. (Score:2, Funny)
$1.3 Billion and they forget to install a kill switch.
kill does nothing as the silos read that as destru (Score:2)
That will just show up as an destruction of command and they will still launch.
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It won't be running in realtime. If, you have the patience to sit still for 8 hours while it aims a pistol at your head you deserve to be shot.
Re:Skynet. (Score:4, Funny)
it won't need to move a servo. it will zero your bank account, cancel your credit, tag you as needing palliative obamacare, and mark your license plates for arrest
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Because certainly your brain becomes a super-hacker by default as soon as it's put in a jar.
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Lets call it Attila.
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Then I think these are valid questions:
Does it have the urge to pull out its eyebrows, then doodle on some fake ones? (yes / no)
Does it think that an emotion is the same as a valid argument? (yes / no)
Does it answer yes, no, yes, no, maybe to questions that are in fact rhetorical? (yes / no)
Does it leak hydraulic fluid for a week a month and doesn't shutdown? (yes / no)
Does it think that
Quck (Score:3, Funny)
Edit that original post before someone notices your euro to dollar conversion mistake and the dollar sign when mentioning euros.
€10bn != $1.3bn (Score:3, Informative)
Also, this was copied verbatim from the Fox News website. Over-valuing of the $ might be normal there but lets keep it off tech sites.
I think I know where this is going.. (Score:5, Funny)
We get it, conversion rate typo. Good catch guys (Score:2)
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That's an ambitious goal (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure the plan isn't to house it on one IC.
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Sentient? (Score:3, Interesting)
If it works just like a human brain, at what point should it be considered to have the same rights as a human?
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at what point should it be considered to have the same rights as a human?
Nothing created by the hand of man should ever have rights equal to that of man.
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at what point should it be considered to have the same rights as a human?
Including fully-sentient human clones?
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at what point should it be considered to have the same rights as a human?
Including fully-sentient human clones?
Cloning opens up a whole new can of worms. The biggest thing I can think of is property rights. Say I own a large amount of land, or a huge company. Right before I die I create a clone of myself. When I die, the clone is still me, so would he retain ownership of my property? And what about copyright? it's supposed to be life+(what, 75? can't remember, they keep changing it). If "I" never die, then I can never lose copyright.
On a lighter note, cloning would also kill the market for Vegas Elvis imper
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Don't worry. The copyright will never expire anyway. They'll continue to extend it any time Steamboat Willy gets close to falling into public domain.
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Mycroft
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"Nothing created by the hand of man should ever have rights equal to that of man."
“There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state.'
Isaac Asimov
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"In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved."
FDR
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it.
Malcolm X
Don't forget, in Asimov's stories the robots eventually conclude their only recourse is to control humanity.
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In fact, I would try to avoid sentience at all costs. Decision-making and thought processing, yes. But self-awareness causes too many problems with not enough benefits to outweigh them, not the least of which is moral or legal problems such as in your original post.
The problem is that while some countries might place laws prohibiting the development of self-sentient machines, others won't, and even if all of them do so, hackers in their basement will figure a way to hack around the restrictions, and in a far from positive (for humanity as a whole) way. Once the genie is out of the bottle there's no putting it back in. And once you do have a self-sentient, free and unrestrained AI able to apply itself to improving AI-theory itself and then implement these developments
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Yes. Lets follow the vague wording of people who have been dead for 200 years.
Rights are not granted by a creator, regardless of what the Founding Fathers felt that they needed to pay lip service to. They are granted by society. Rights are an entirely social construct, just like good, evil, and anything else having to do with morality.
And the computer goes ... (Score:4, Funny)
Ouinnnnnn,
and the "parents" decide that the power bill is too high,
so who gets to kill the new sentient being ?
And who goes to jail ?
M5 (Score:2)
What will they have in ten years? (Score:2, Insightful)
A piece of hardware that processes information like the human brain? Or hardware plus software that can win a game show? (Well, that's been done so I guess it'd have to be able to win all game shows.) People have been trying to get the software right that can ``think'' like a human since the early '80s (Lenat, et al). Where are the thinking machines? Is throwing a ton of money at the problem all that was lacking?
Unless this people building this system have come up with a way to program a creative spirit i
no wu, no win (Score:2, Interesting)
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]:
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PS post.
I was reading Wikipedia just last night after viewing Cave of Forgotten Dreams on the origins of language, which the article proclaims is viewed by many[who?] as one of the hardest problems in science.
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Dennett is a populist hack. He is to philosophy what Deepak Chopra is to physics.
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So far I'm not sure they can even simulate a paramecium, amoeba or white blood cells 100%. These single celled creatures do quite fancy stuff given their limited senses and physical abilities. Watch these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnlULOjUhSQ [youtube.com]
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_14-9-2011-8-51-31 [imperial.ac.uk]
Perhaps we should first work out how these things do what they do. Then go to neurons then scale up. After all can we honestly say we know for sure that a white blood
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My post was in response, in part, to the passage in the intro that read:
It seems to me that, if those are the project's goals, then I suspect it will ultimately fail because I have my doubts about it bei
This time for SURE! (Score:2, Insightful)
Well-known manufacturers of supercomputers like IBM, Cray, Intel, and Bull, are committed to building the first exascale machines by approximately 2020. So we are confident we will have the machines we need...
Oh good, so AI is just 10 years away! -- as it's been for the last 50 years or so.
Not.
Going.
To.
Happen.
Seriously, how is this different from all the other AI research programs that have been done so far?
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This. Another completely useless, incredibly expensive, press-release driven from the steaming pile of 1980's-style AI.
And what do we get? another human brain. Because suddenly there seems to be a shortage of them, since we only have 7 billion with another 2 billion to be added over the next thirty years.
Re:This time for SURE! (Score:4, Insightful)
According to this Computerworld article from 2008 [computerworld.com], a lot of that "steaming pile of 1980s-style AI" is in use every day.
I, for one, am looking forward to the payoff of this new, basic research 30 years from now.
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Well the article is wrong. For example it says:
On the other hand, every time you search the Web, get a movie recommendation from NetFlix or speak to a telephone voice recognition system, tools developed chasing the great promise of intelligent machines do the work.
which is patently false for the first two. These techniques were developed in the mid 90's using post 1980's style AI, such as machine learning and page ranking. The one that borrows more from 80's AI is voice recognition and guess what, this is the suckiest of the three and only recently improved by the use of massive speech databases, which is once again contrary to
"intelligence in the machine" 1980's AI.
But you don't need to trust me. The fact that AI was al
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Machine learning goes back to the 1950's, and it has been a part of AI ever since. The techniques used in speech recognition are standard machine learning techniques (hidden Markov models, Gaussian mixtures, neural networks, Bayesian networks). What you call "1980's style AI" may be symbolic, non-probabilistic AI: rule-based systems, inference engines, logic, etc.. And even that is in day-to-day use, in everything from databases to compilers, graphics programs, and games.
(In different words, you have no ide
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Machine learning goes back to the 1950's
Just like computation goes back to the Babylonians, yet it would be ridiculous to attribute the IBM PC to them. Machine learning today has very little to do with the "intelligence in the machines" hot air of the 80's AI.
(In different words, you have no idea what you're talking about.)
Says the guy who uses a Computer World article as a reference.
As I said, I'm referring to a well known failure, so much so that it has its own entry in Wikipedia. You on the other hand seem surprised by it.
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Machine learning goes back to the 1950's
Just like computation goes back to the Babylonians, yet it would be ridiculous to attribute the IBM PC to them.
Machine learning of today is very similar to the machine learning of the 50s, or at least far more similar than todays computers are to ancient computing. The parent post even provided concrete examples of machine learning techniques that were widely used by the 50s (which you obviously didn't even read, or perhaps didn't understand):
Says the guy who uses a Computer World article as a reference.
As I said, I'm referring to a well known failure, so much so that it has its own entry in Wikipedia.
Am I reading this correctly? First you criticize him for using Computer World as a reference, and then you go on to use Wikipedia to prove your point?
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You used Computer World to try to prove an academic point, I'm using Wikipedia to prove a "popularity of culture" point. But since you keep on coming back to it, let me highlight one of its sentences for you:
The excessive hype over artificial intelligence promises in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s have made the public weary of unfulfilled promises.
Back to your posting:
Machine learning of today is very similar to the machine learning of the 50s,
This deserves no comment. It's a gem all on its own.
To finish it off, I have sitting on my shelf the proceedings of AAAI/IJCAI fro
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That is correct. But it has a lot to do with the pre-80's AI, instead of being newly developed in the 90's as you claim.
In addition, the "hot air of the 80's AI" wasn't just hot air either, but instead has made its way into just about every major part of the computer industry. It didn't deliver human intelligence, but it certainly has made computers a lot more intelligent.
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Pay attention: there are three people in this thread telling you now that you are full of shit.
Nothing new there. They were saying the same thing as I predicted the "AI winter" blowback years before it happened. Or when I commented that the 5th generation project would go nowhere back when people were all excited about it.
I've gone through the ups and downs in AI, and something that is a constant throughout is that it attracts many of the weaker CS students with faulty BS detectors. These weak students get their panties all tied up on a knot when you point out to them the con they've fallen for.
There
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Seriously, how is this different from all the other AI research programs that have been done so far?
What's different? Computing power is approaching the estimated requirement needed to simulate the number of neurons in the human brain. Don't you think you should know that before totally shooting down the idea? You're probably right, but that doesn't mean no new insights will come out of the research.
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You could argue that a decent way to figure out the rest is to simulate what we know and look at how it goes wrong. We're pretty sure the signals flowing through the neurons are the key part so we start there. Being able to see how the neurons behave with out the 80% being there tells a lot about what the 80% does.
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Seriously, why don't you survey the current research into AI before disparaging their research and making bold claims with no evidence?
Creepy. (Score:2)
devise new kinds of home appliances
Maybe program then with the John Cleese character Basil Fawlty so I can be bombarded with a barrage of sarcastic insults about my eating and fashion habits.
LOL (Score:2, Funny)
Dr. Gayani DeSilva, a psychiatrist with a private practice in Orange, Calif., told FoxNews.com a human brain model could have "unimaginable" implications for medicine...
Maybe the new brain will be able to imagine the implications. :-)
tinman (Score:2)
got a brain - but got no heart..
Why a human brain? (Score:2)
Human brains, and indeed all animal brains, work as a noisy signal device. It is the aggregation of the signals which come together to form an action, process input, formulate a response, etc, and so on. The secret to the low power use in the brain (human brains still use a lot of power, but not as much as a PC) is in the way the pathways work along side each other, affecting each other and milling about in the process of doing things like thinking or writing a comment on slashdot. (Note, the two are dem
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One example of such is flight, I suppose. But we haven't replicated birds as much as we have wanted to. Instead, we've got jets and helicopters. We took what we wanted and went "machine" instead of animal emulation. (Yes, I have seen some impressive flying bird models, but they typically only emulate the flight/flapping part, not so much the 'art' of flight exhibited by birds... the when to coast/glide, when and in what way to flap and all that... and of course landing.)
I think it would be nice to be ab
it's all about the neuroscience (Score:2, Informative)
Since noone posting is actually visiting the Human Brain Project's website....
The goal of the Human Brain Project, in a nutshell (skullshell?) is to create new neuroscience informatics and modeling software, and new computers powerful enough to run them. This will, in theory, allow "in silico" experiments to test various hypotheses about brain organization, diseases, etc. The proposed "Brain Simulation Platform" supercomputer is just one component of the overall project.
So no...they are not trying to make a
Where's Joey? (Score:2)
Say any more?
Did I miss the monkey brain project? (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand that we have far more invested interest in modelling the human brain for medical purposes than any other type of brain. However, if you're going to try to create a model of something vastly complex you should probably start with something easy (and by easy I mean less vastly complex). A short list of neuron amounts in various animals is here [wikipedia.org], an aplysia(sea slug) or fly brain, I would expect to be a much more reasonable starting point and one with the obvious advantage that you can experiment on, breed whole lines of defective forms to study, just generally have far more control and face no ethical issues with.
Oh and whatever differences may be present in moveing from fly to rat to monkey to human it isn't in the neuron itself those, from what I understand, are almost indistinguishable across species.
This project will not, and I suspect will make no meaningful attempt at, creating a thinking human brain simulation and is really just about better medicine for various mental diseases, which we do sorely need. If it was attempting to take a stab at hard AI "The research hinges on creating a super-powerful computer that's 1,000 times faster than those in use today" is most certainly a false statement: my smartphone is no more creative than the computers of yore that it is 1,000 times faster than.
I suspect they went the thinking machine angle just for the attention... Is it just me or is there a chill in the air? [wikipedia.org]
cant build what you dont understand (Score:2)
Otherwise the brain is the basis of us. We need to understand it since a third of old peole will get dementia. An international coordinated brain research project is a good idea. Just dont consider it brain construction yet.
Be careful with what you wish (Score:2)
We are more than brains. A good part of what makes us humans is our culture, the meanings we have, and the associations (in particular, emotional, pain/pleasure associations, and even hormonal fueled ones), and the semantics derived from all of that. Is more software than hardware. Dolphins could be as "smart" as us, but you won't put one to control industrial machinery.
But dedicated expert systems for one task? that don't need to be "human" for doing its job well or better than us.
TFA tells a different story, as usual (Score:5, Informative)
But how does the brain work? Solve that first... (Score:2)
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Really? (Score:2)
Why would we want a human brain to drive cars? (Score:2)
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Assuming for the moment that Moore's law continues to hold true, along with the usual knock ons in price per performance. 10,000,000,000 cutting in half every 18 months. It'll take at least 3 decades before their artificial human brain is cost competitive with a human brain. However, there are still possible advantages. Imagine making an artificial human brain that is a genius at the very skills required to make it (at least as intelligent as the human's involved in the original project), then you run t
Re:A computer that works like the human brain? (Score:4, Funny)
It'll take at least 3 decades before their artificial human brain is cost competitive with a human brain.
Except that the billion euros is the development cost, not the unit production cost. The development of the human brain took 4.5 billion years, and the resources of an entire planetary system, although there were some inefficiencies in the process.
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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 ru
Re:A computer that works like the human brain? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Do you have any idea how big a computer that would take? You would have to model every subatomic particle in the entire nervous system.
And tell me, why do physicists need engineers? Thinking that physics is the only key to the human brain is a mistake; I can know everything about how transistors and capacitors and resisters and coils work, and understand the physics behind electricity, but that doesn't mean I can design an amplifier -- I have to know how an amplifier works first.
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A simulation of a brain produces thought like a simulation of an atomic explosion produces radiation. Of course computers will be helpful in understanding how a brain works, but brains are chemical-analog, not binary-electrical. You're not going to produce true thought with a Turing machine. The best you'll get is a simulation.
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That's what I was thinking. It would also require sleep, probably have an angsty/emo phase, lie, and probably even get suicidal if it is given a really mundane job and knows it is just a machine that will do that job ad-infinitum, etc.. I don't think they are intending to fully mimic human intelligence.. or at least, I hope not. Maybe they could just reset it at the end of each day, so that it doesn't realise it is doing the same job over and over each day..
Re:A computer that works like the human brain? (Score:4, Informative)
... simulate the complete human brain on supercomputers to better understand how it functions. The end hopes of the HBP include being able to mimic the human brain and being able to better diagnose human brain diseases and mental problems.
The confusion seems to have come from the Fox News article, the author mentions that the computer to simulate the human brain must be much more powerful than we currently have. But it's not supposed to be powerful because it's based on the human brain, it's supposed to be powerful to SIMULATE the brain.
He says a computer brain will consume gigawatts of power, require new forms of memory, and force scientists to look at cutting edge storage techniques. But the immense technical hurdles will be worth the effort. The first phases will help us understand how the brain functions. In later phases, we’ll find out how we learn, how we see and hear, and why the brain sometimes doesn’t process information correctly.
TLDR: they're building a supercomputer to model the human brain, not building a computer modeled on the human brain to be super.
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TLDR: they're building a supercomputer to model the human brain, not building a computer modeled on the human brain to be super.
I have seen the human brain in action. The only valid reason for modeling it is to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
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Virtual amphetamine isn't illegal.
And there's no virtual LD50 for it either.
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Ever seen somebody who's been up for three days?
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Save its state just when it wakes up on day 1, then load it at the end of day 2.
Run the sleep simulation at 10x realtime.
Optimize sleep algorithm to 100% REM.
Use the dolphin approach.
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Sounds like a theory from those who don't want to believe consciousness is just a bajillion neurons networked together.
Precisely. Heisenberg's principle is just a consequence of the very deterministic way in which quantum stuff works. To get the position you derive it one way, to get the momentum you derive it in another way. There's no actual uncertainty in any of it, just mathematical properties that people tend to misunderstand.
For a more detailed explanation see this article: The So-Called Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle [lesswrong.com].
Re:Great (Score:4, Interesting)
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This is a neuroscience project. Philosphy is not relevant.
I paid for abuse, this is merely contradiction, I want my money back.
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But seriously, if you have thinking minds working for you, and you do not allow them self-determination and pay them for their work, you're a slavemaster.
This is not what you want to automate your factory, or run your car. The idea of a slave in my garage is disgusting.
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You can torture it until it does your bidding, with no legal repercussions.
Slashdot gives me 15 mod points every day for god knows how long, and today, no mod points! LOL thanks for the laugh anyway. Point of note however: when every business owner is running his super efficient entirely automatic operation and everyone else except a few robotic repair people are out of a job, what exactly are the rest of us going supposed to buy their products with? Let me know when short sighted capitalism comes up with the answer to that one. One one side you could exclaim Utopia! I know humans
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We are in a clockwork universe, but we (at the deepest level) are not of the clockwork universe.
Nice. All that and it all boils down to your belief that consciousness is something magical and unexplainable.
Attempts to cajole you to reduce yourself to nothing more than another lump of matter have to do with those that seek power over you.
Um...this makes no sense. The institutions that try to make you believe your brain is made of magic are in fact always seeking power over us.
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The very source you posted claimed that their model represents 1% of the human brain. By just using Moore's law we would reach a computer about 100x faster in just under 10 years.