2020: Are We Only 9 Years Away from an Artificial Human Brain?
"It's a new brain. The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions, complex cognitive functions. It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ. It is evolving at an enormous speed."
Henry Markram, Director, Project Blue Brain.
Excellent news for fans of computer technology, neuroscience, and people who think that humans telling the machines what to do is totally backwards. Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, says we are ten years away from a functional artificial human brain. The Blue Brain project was launched in 2005 and aims to reverse engineer the mammalian brain from laboratory data.
We reported on the recent attempts of the Swiss Mind Brain Institute to simulate the neocortical column of the rat using an IBM Blue Gene machine with 10,000 processors, and they've announced success of the first phase of their project.
"We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever," Markram told the audience at a TED Global Conference at Oxford, England. "There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder," he told the audience. The project may give insights into new treatments."
They've successfully simulated the neocortical column of a rat – only a fraction of a full brain, but they proved that you don't get to do world-shattering research when you settle for second-best by choosing one of the most complicated and vital pieces of any mammalian cortex.
They also proved that even world-class scientists still have to compete for funding, following up this amazing achievement with bold claims that the same process could simulate an entire rat brain within three years, and a human brain within ten. Obviously a team that sat down one day and said "We're going to build a mind from scratch using better parts than nature did" is ambitious, but projecting an upgrade to human consciousness from a 2 mm chunk of grey matter designed purely to think "eat garbage" and "carry Plague" within ten years? That's enough to make Alexander the Great wave his hands and say "Hang on guys, aren't you setting your sights a little high?"
To anyone who's worked in science the reasons for these assertions are obvious: attention and funding. And it's a travesty that they have to do so - they've achieved one of the most incredible advances in the last decade of neuroscience and the idea that they have to make that sound even cooler is insane: it's like inventing a perpetual motion machine and having to offer it in designer colours to get people interested. Assuming they continue to get support for this little "One of the Greatest Achievements ever to be conceived of by Man" project, it will raise a number of critical questions:
1. Are we going to need a court order to reboot this thing?
Considering that most scientists don't subscribe to the "magic invisible soul dust" theory of what creates human consciousness, a simulation that recreates the activity of a human brain may produce ethical concerns. Technically a computer that recreates a rat brain would raise similar issues but, as you're about to see, these guys don't have any sympathy for rats.
2. How do they plan to get a human model?
The existing rat neocortical model is based on a huge amount of data from real working rat brains - or at least, brains that were working until the scientists got a hold of them. Where the team ran into gaps in the existing data they cracked open rat skulls, extracted the brains, sliced them into wafers while keeping them alive and recorded their responses. It isn't known whether they cackled maniacally while screaming "They said we were fools, but we'll show them, we'll show them ALL!" during this procedure, because anybody who can slice a brain into strips while keeping it alive isn't someone you want to annoy with questions.
Suffice to say when one third of your research staff are on the "Knifing things in the head" payroll:
a) You're already two steps into a horror movie script
b) You aren't just assuming there are no such thing as ghosts, you're betting the survival of everyone in the building on the fact
c) This is NOT a method that can be scaled up to humans without a rogue agent with nothing to lose being sent to kill you in a highly ironic manner.
3. Can we make improvements?
Those involved in the project sing its praises in work to understand the human brain, but it's only a matter of time until somebody thinks about making improvements - minus an hour at most, actually, because that's the first thing I thought of when I read about it.
With the ability to simulate the effects of rewiring, drugs or external electric fields at an individual neuron level we can investigate enhancements (such as new senses, new cognitive modes or neuroelectric interfaces) without all the inconvenient "human rights violations" and "Crimes against humanity" such research normally entails. We could improve our own minds - and since we'll have just invented a silicon model operating at computer speeds in a bulletproof shell, we'll have to.
Casey Kazan with Luke McKinney
Sources:
BBC World News
Blue Brain project simulation milestone
Our initial report
"We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever," Markram told the audience at a TED Global Conference at Oxford, England. "There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder," he told the audience. The project may give insights into new treatments."
They've successfully simulated the neocortical column of a rat – only a fraction of a full brain, but they proved that you don't get to do world-shattering research when you settle for second-best by choosing one of the most complicated and vital pieces of any mammalian cortex.
They also proved that even world-class scientists still have to compete for funding, following up this amazing achievement with bold claims that the same process could simulate an entire rat brain within three years, and a human brain within ten. Obviously a team that sat down one day and said "We're going to build a mind from scratch using better parts than nature did" is ambitious, but projecting an upgrade to human consciousness from a 2 mm chunk of grey matter designed purely to think "eat garbage" and "carry Plague" within ten years? That's enough to make Alexander the Great wave his hands and say "Hang on guys, aren't you setting your sights a little high?"
To anyone who's worked in science the reasons for these assertions are obvious: attention and funding. And it's a travesty that they have to do so - they've achieved one of the most incredible advances in the last decade of neuroscience and the idea that they have to make that sound even cooler is insane: it's like inventing a perpetual motion machine and having to offer it in designer colours to get people interested. Assuming they continue to get support for this little "One of the Greatest Achievements ever to be conceived of by Man" project, it will raise a number of critical questions:
1. Are we going to need a court order to reboot this thing?
Considering that most scientists don't subscribe to the "magic invisible soul dust" theory of what creates human consciousness, a simulation that recreates the activity of a human brain may produce ethical concerns. Technically a computer that recreates a rat brain would raise similar issues but, as you're about to see, these guys don't have any sympathy for rats.
2. How do they plan to get a human model?
The existing rat neocortical model is based on a huge amount of data from real working rat brains - or at least, brains that were working until the scientists got a hold of them. Where the team ran into gaps in the existing data they cracked open rat skulls, extracted the brains, sliced them into wafers while keeping them alive and recorded their responses. It isn't known whether they cackled maniacally while screaming "They said we were fools, but we'll show them, we'll show them ALL!" during this procedure, because anybody who can slice a brain into strips while keeping it alive isn't someone you want to annoy with questions.
Suffice to say when one third of your research staff are on the "Knifing things in the head" payroll:
a) You're already two steps into a horror movie script
b) You aren't just assuming there are no such thing as ghosts, you're betting the survival of everyone in the building on the fact
c) This is NOT a method that can be scaled up to humans without a rogue agent with nothing to lose being sent to kill you in a highly ironic manner.
3. Can we make improvements?
Those involved in the project sing its praises in work to understand the human brain, but it's only a matter of time until somebody thinks about making improvements - minus an hour at most, actually, because that's the first thing I thought of when I read about it.
With the ability to simulate the effects of rewiring, drugs or external electric fields at an individual neuron level we can investigate enhancements (such as new senses, new cognitive modes or neuroelectric interfaces) without all the inconvenient "human rights violations" and "Crimes against humanity" such research normally entails. We could improve our own minds - and since we'll have just invented a silicon model operating at computer speeds in a bulletproof shell, we'll have to.
Casey Kazan with Luke McKinney
Sources:
BBC World News
Blue Brain project simulation milestone
Our initial report
Comments
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I seriously doubt this, will be more like 2120 before you see anything close to a synthetic human brain.
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/02/adding-up-the-worlds-storage-and-computation-capacities.ars
Posted by: Observer | February 14, 2011 at 08:59 AM
I've been following this research for at least three years and I am sure that he will succeed.
Posted by: Stainless Steel Rat | February 14, 2011 at 07:14 PM
I've been following this research for at least three years and I am sure that he will succeed.
Posted by: Stainless Steel Rat | February 14, 2011 at 07:14 PM
good advancement but could be seriously dangerous if applied to humans. Because one of the human tendency is to find pleasure in destruction,artificially brained humans would hopefully not like that.
Posted by: priti | February 14, 2011 at 11:28 PM
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Posted by: mohamed khatab | February 15, 2011 at 08:23 AM
these predictions of time until something happens are always way off and discredit themselves.
Posted by: ConfessionsOfAManwhore dot com | February 15, 2011 at 10:12 AM
these predictions of time until something happens are always way off and discredit themselves.
Posted by: ConfessionsOfAManwhore dot com | February 15, 2011 at 10:12 AM
Ray Kurzweil is surely right =)
Posted by: Alexander Kent | February 15, 2011 at 11:02 AM
i,m sure that he will do it but i have some fear about it,s future
what will happen if it used in the evil...
Posted by: ptcs | February 15, 2011 at 03:03 PM
"Magic invisible soul dust?" Seriously? Tell me that's not your best interpretation of how a multidimensional realm of "information" might interact with the insignificant fraction of physics knowledge that we've surmised thus far.
It's okay to say "I don't know." For instance, "I don't know how I came to be in my body, as opposed to in that person's."
I don't know if a virtual collection of neurons running in a brain emulation platform is able to be "conscious," though it may certainly be capable of appearing that way long enough to pass a Turing test.
How did you get in there? Is it simply meaningless self-awareness, or is it something else we just don't officially know? If you're sure of your answer, how much do you want to bet?
Posted by: Anonymous | February 15, 2011 at 04:56 PM
OK, this makes a LOT of sense dude.
www.privacy-online.au.tc
Posted by: Jo Denny | February 15, 2011 at 07:07 PM
I strongly bliv that this research exercise at its best of findings cannot/can never on equal palance with the creator's production, hence it's not safe to possess.
Posted by: Emma Daniel | February 16, 2011 at 03:37 AM
For all those callinh this heracy against the "creator" you should remember two things
1. No one is making improvements (going against the "creator") until this thing actually functions in such a way that it can replace the brain of a person with mental illness.
2. Ignore all you have been taught about religion and how modifying ourselves is a sin, and so on, and just think. Wouldnt you like it if you were able to make millions of thoughts and connections between ideas a second? To analyze data at the same speed as a computer? To see other spectrums of light such as infrared and x-ray? All these things are possible with the artificial brain.
Finally, if this were finished, it would not just be given to the public at random. It would be tested and retested so many times to find glitches that it would HAVE to be safe befor implementation.
Posted by: vsams14 | February 16, 2011 at 09:10 PM
Could be sooner. The timescale has already dropped a year from when you created the URL for this page to writing the content!
Posted by: Mark Williams | February 17, 2011 at 10:10 AM
Very interesting article thanks to the author
Posted by: Интернет,решения и съвети | February 18, 2011 at 08:27 AM
Not a chance in 9 years - I'm a researcher in AI.
Posted by: Dr Andrew Edmonds | February 22, 2011 at 07:44 AM
Glad the writers were able to construct this "article" for the masses. You wouldn't want an post to be written above a 5th grade reading level, especially one about a theoretical, highly-advanced synthetic brain... Swing and a miss.
Posted by: D.F. | February 22, 2011 at 10:18 AM
Hello. I am doing a little research about Brain computer Interface. Brain Computer Interface technology provides a direct electronic interface and can convey messages and commands directly from the human brain to a computer. It involves monitoring conscious brain electrical activity via electroencephalogram (EEG) signals and detecting characteristics of EEG patterns via digital signal processing algorithms that the user generates to communicate. So.. Yesterday I found one great Open Access ( free to download&share ) book “Recent Advances in Brain-Computer Interface Systems” here : http://www.intechopen.com/books/show/title/recent-advances-in-brain-computer-interface-systems Take a look, it is great. Cheers! ;)
Posted by: brian | March 11, 2011 at 05:33 AM
i want be need something like anything about artificial mind
Posted by: sunil kumar | May 30, 2011 at 04:36 AM