How long before pcs become the human brain

Caporegime
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Well i guess a lot of you seen johnny pnewmonic and similar type films .How long before we or pcs use either human parts or humans use pc parts for eg hard drives.
do not laugh a lot of sci fi films are future reality in the making what is the next step?
 
Surely you have realised the human brain far exceeds that of a computer.

Without the input and use of a human, a machine is useless.
 
dgmug said:
thing that gets me how can a pc overcome a human brain as the human designs it.

So? They are almost infinitely faster at many many things. If they know everything we know and how to apply it then they would overcome us extremely easily.
 
yes but the brain is x1000s more powerful than any pc just because the average human cant compute something as fast as a pc there are that can (savant or like) raw numbers and pcs basics information data is based on a human thought.doesnt mean a pc will beat a human brain.
 
Neural nets and synapses of a brain have already been modelled within supercomputers. I think the most complex we have so far is that of a simulated mouse brain.

However, that's a far cry from a human brain. Especially when you consider the power and neural complexity of conciousness and self-awareness that humans have.

I think it'll be a very very very long time before we hear a computer ponder its own existence.
 
dgmug said:
yes but the brain is x1000s more powerful than any pc just because the average human cant compute something as fast as a pc there are that can (savant or like) raw numbers and pcs basics information data is based on a human thought.doesnt mean a pc will beat a human brain.

if the average brain cant utilise all that power then it simply doesnt have it. its like having potential and not using it, making it utterly useless.

i dont see any reason why a computer wouldnt be able to 'beat' a human brain its just a matter of time, how much i just cant say
 
Zefan said:
So? They are almost infinitely faster at many many things. If they know everything we know and how to apply it then they would overcome us extremely easily.
...

All they need is machine learning implemented correctly and some great hardware (nothing resembling the architecture we have now) and they will become far more developed than us in a stupidly short amount of time. Unfortunately true machine learning isn't easy.
 
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Well, seeing as neuroscience hasn't really progressed to the point of understanding how the brain processes information, or indeed how the brain encodes information in its electrical firing, such an ambitious aim of bona fide AI is a LONG way off. This is despite the massive amounts of money pumped into this area of science over the last 15 years or so (the 90's was known as the decade of the brain).

Besides which, the computational power of the human brain far exceeds supercomputers at the moment by many orders of magnitude; the array of supercomputers at IBM used for big blue are now being put to use Markram et al. in the blue brain project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain. The idea is to simulate a small functional unit of the rat brain of around 10,000 neurons (10^4). The simulations are not done in real-time. For a comparison the human brain is thought to contain approximately 10^11 neurons.

Interesting attempts have been made to simulate how the brain computes, mostly in theoretical psychology in the study of how the brain processes language by using artificial neural networks. Even after many years of study this remains unclear, and it has not been decisively concluded whether the brain uses symbolic (eg a particular set of neurons) or distributed processing to represent words, semantics and so on.

Current artificial neural networks usually use 'point neuron' models (McCulloch and Pitts 1943 http://www.cns.bu.edu/~guenther/encyclopedia.pdf) which assume that a neuron can be simplified to a single point in space which receives electrical inputs, both positive and negative, over a set time period. If in that time frame a threshold is reached then the neuron 'fires'; it sends a signal to the neurons downstream of it in the network. This simplification is massive, and ignores much of the complexity in terms of how the neurons structure contributes to its processing of inputs and logical operations.

Donald Hebb (1949) introduced the idea of a learning mechanism for neurons - proposing the idea that if this threshold had been reached then the neurons had contributed to causing it to fire would have a greater effect in the future - their connection to the neuron would be strengthened, whilst those that had not would be weakened. this allows neurons to organise themselves to form associations to certains inputs.

For a review of the philosophical ideas behind AI look at strong and weak AI. Strong AI is the idea that machines can be conscious, weak AI that algorithmic processes could simulate human thinking whilst not actually being conscious - see Alan Turing's Turing test, and philosophers such as John Searle for an argument against strong AI (the Chinese
 
I'll expand this a little - Do you think in the next 100 years we could merge technology with our brains? Chips in our head, maybe to improve our intelligence or to communicate, or possibly reduce the desktop PC to a simple chip in our head!
 
Mik3 said:
I'll expand this a little - Do you think in the next 100 years we could merge technology with our brains? Chips in our head, maybe to improve our intelligence or to communicate, or possibly reduce the desktop PC to a simple chip in our head!
Not in the next 100 years. We still understand far too little about our brains to do this and progress is incredibly slow.
 
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