Euro boffins plan supercomputer to SIMULATE HUMAN BRAIN The European Commission has selected the Human Brain Project (HBP) as one of its Future and Emerging Technologies and will send it up to €1.19b over ten years so it can build a supercomputer capable of simulating the human brain. The HBP wants to build a simulated brain because we don't know enough about our grey matter. The …
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Exactly my point... so the more like our own brains we make a computer, the more stupid/unpredictable/unreliable/jealous/paranoid/warmongering it'll become. Awesome. All they need to do is plug that thing into the interwebs and...
Remind me to stop at the supermarket on my way home for a roll of tinfoil ;o)
Take €1.19b of taxpayers money.
Stick said money in a high interest account for 9 years.
Spend the 9 years writing code that you know will need more computing power than you can afford at 2013 prices, even with 1.19 billion in the bank.
9 years later.
Buy a few of the latest CPUs or graphics cards for a few hundred euros each, which thanks to Moores law will now give you more processing power than you could have imagined in 2013, and will be able to run your brain simulator with ease.
Buy a medium sized Caribbean island and retire there with the remainder of the cash.
Paul Turner has kindly pointed out similarities between SpiNNaker and the HBP proposal. This is no accident: Steve Furber and I have had considerable input into HBP, and we are major partners in this project.
As far as we are concerned, we gain immeasurably from access to interested Neuroscientists and the other skills we do not have. For example Seth Grant (Edinburgh/Cambridge/Sanger Institute) is one of the foremost scientists in the field of genetics and neuroscience. Stanislas Dehaene is a great Cognitive Scientist.
The difficulty with multi-disciplinary research projects is finding people willing to cooperate and willing to invest the time to understand the new languages used to describe other fields of science. For example, integrating the SpiNNaker chip into robotics is not something many mainstream roboticists wish to undertake, and with good reason. With most robots one would want to be sure about what it will do, for safety reasons if no others; this is not an option if the device's behaviour changes as it learns.
Steve and I have already invested time and effort talking to the "neurorobotic" part of the project: Alois Knoll and the rest of his team in Munich (there's a SpiNNaker board there already linked to one of their robots), Murray Shannahan at Imperial and others.
We also need the biological insights that will come from the neuroscience part of the project led by Henry Markram at EPFL Lausanne. Without this, we will struggle to make our work "biologically relevant".
Of course, there is also the Graphene research that won the other €1 billion prize; they're celebrating on the floor below me!
I think murder is a legal term and is only (for now) applicable to humans.
Also, depends on whether you can save the memory and state of the computer before turning it off - if you can, and if you can restore them later if you turn it back on you can say that you only put it to sleep temporarily...
Killing a thinking, feeling being without just cause is wrong - and if the laws discriminate against electronic brains, so much the worse for the man-made governments that would think to violate the eternal laws of God!
However, a previous brain simulation attempt involved only simulating the merest fraction of the brain; we may not be close to the point at which ethical considerations actually apply.
You're right. It''s much easier to dissect a living human brain, examine small parts of it, change chemical its balance and so on, all while doing zero damage and not affecting it with sedatives and pain killers.
With in a decade we should be able to simulate whole sections of an individual's brain, and help find the best treatment for that person.
In 2 decades a whole brain could be simulated, and yes the question of whether the simulation has its own consciousness and related the moral and legal rights.
In 3 to 4 decades we could be looking at the very real possibility of digital immortality.
Perhaps they should first solve the problem of how to build computers that use photons instead of electrons.
Once they have solved that problem, they can then make them large enough to simulate brain activity without generating ridiculous amounts of heat, and costing a fortune in electricity to run.
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