One step closer to the singularity
I, for one, welcome our new Supercompter Overlords:
Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. ‘If we build this brain right, it will do everything,’
Fortunately, we’ve got a little time to prepare ourselves for the inevitable machine revolution:
In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. . . . Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. . . . But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.
(Via kottke.org.)
March 6th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
We all know that this ends with us being used for the electricity our bodies produce and being fed a neural simulation known as The Matrix. There’s nothing we can do except wait with bated break for Larry Fishbourne and Keanu Reeves.
March 6th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Bated breath even.
March 6th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Not so fast there, Markey Boy. Turns out ya gotta get the wiring right, too:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=white-matter-matters
“…connect D48 lead of node 3,623,753,501 (red wire/white and mauve dotted stripe) to socket 725Q of node 18,148,723. Before proceeding, ensure proper grounding connections of directly affected sub-nodes (mossy green wire/lemon-yellow baroque curlicue; see Appendix JC.23.78, diagram 34,279….”
Yeesh. I think I’ll stick with my wind-up, clockwork Babbage Automaton, thank you very much.
March 6th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
Wait, you have a wind-up clockwork Babbage Automaton? When on earth did you find the time to build that?
March 6th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
BC, I thought the end was that the computers hack in to the weapons systems of the world and use them and an army of robots to wipe out most humans, except for a resistance effort led by Linda Hamilton’s son. Then there’s a whole complicated series of events involving time travel and the governor of California, who is a cyborg, first trying to kill said son, and then later trying to protect him from other cyborgs.
I think. In that case the thing to do is live off the grid, stockpile anti-cyborg weaponry, and wait for judgement day.
March 8th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Judgment day will be great if it means getting stuck alone in a cave with Claire Danes, compelled to begin the post-apocalyptic repopulation of the planet.
March 8th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Interesting, but I have to agree with Juan about the wiring!
I’m reminded of another audacious item from the history of artificial intelligence, Doug Lenat’s CYC Project. Back in the 1980s I attended a series of presentations on this effort to create a database of several hundred thousand pieces of “common sense knowledge”. The idea was to combine this database with an “inference engine” to enable human-like reasoning. This appears to be an ongoing effort that hasn’t yet revolutionized our lives, as far as I can tell.
Still, I think I’ll have to go back and review a book I recently read, Daniel H. Wilson’s How to Survive a Robot Uprising.