How long before pcs become the human brain

As far as cybernetics goes - they're done artifical retinas and cochleas, but to date they're very crude (like 16x16 pixels for sight, maybe a bit more now). But these are easy in that all they do is simulate the receptor cells in the retina or ear, where we know what the cells are signifying when they fire. Past these cells things get vastly more difficult and we usually don't have much idea at all what any given neuron is doing.

There's a guy called Kevin Warwick who bangs on about cybernetics (and had an array of electrodes put in his arm to record from a nerve in his arm as a publicity stunt a few years back) if you're interested. Beware, he is a weird nobber.
 
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!
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In a time where we have blurred the line between man and machine, I doubt they'll be anything such as a desktop PC.

Who knows where computing will lead to. We're already trying to break the barrier between the digital and the physical world, with things like Microsoft Surface, however being so far away from such conceptual computing makes it very difficult to predict.
 
Monkey Puzzle said:
There's a guy called Kevin Warwick who bangs on about cybernetics (and had an array of electrodes put in his arm to record from a nerve in his arm as a publicity stunt a few years back)
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We did something like that to some locusts a few months ago.

Got a live one, plastercined its limbs down, its wings shut, antenna fixed etc so it couldn't move. We shoved an electrode into its chest cavity and fired photo flashes at it and recorded the electrical impulses. After putting the blighter through this horrendous ordeal, we put them in a bucket - which was placed in a -50c freezer to for them to die.

I felt a bit mean to say the least...
 
We did something like that to some locusts a few months ago.

Got a live one, plastercined its limbs down, its wings shut, antenna fixed etc so it couldn't move. We shoved an electrode into its chest cavity and fired photo flashes at it and recorded the electrical impulses. After putting the blighter through this horrendous ordeal, we put them in a bucket - which was placed in a -50c freezer to for them to die.
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Gears of war has taught you well :p
 
well trials are already in place for many embedded electronics.

light sensitive chips in eyes to restore sight.
Radio implants in ear
implants in brain to pick up signals which are then used to drive artficial limbs.

As for using hard drives and computers as the brain. 100-200 years. We dont fully understand the brain, so all though we can pick up certain things and use it ie for the artificial limbs. It's imposable at the moment to say record thoughts to a HDD to preserve certain memorys.

I have no doubt these things will be available, but it's still a long time off.
 
I remember doing an experiment on an anaesthetised mouse once (hope SPEAK or the ALF aren't reading!) and at the end the woman in charge came over and cut its ribcage open with a pair of plastic scissors and got us to put our fingers on its beating heart. Not exactly sure why tbh!
 
thing is there is not real AI developed yet. e.g in games where companies claim they have AI its not really true, its just scripted events. will take a very long time before computers learn to think for themselves.
 
The inherant beauty and also most obvious flaw of computerised logic is that it is that by its very nature its limited by our own imaginations.

By mimicking the fundamental rules of the simulation we are trying to achieve, it is possible to produce a computerised model which appears "clever" but in reality it is simply mimicking a natural law in the way that we have observed and digested it.

The reason in my opinion that comparing a "computer" to the human brain is fundamentally flawed is that the brain has an almost infinate capacity for change whereas something that relies on our change to further its change can never become more advanced than its creators.

The integration of computation into the human body is a natural progression though in my opinion. Things such as sub dermal inner ear transplants for communication is not only very achievable but has almost infinate merits, we will (and already can) augment our more basic functions, in time we will even reproduce the more complex sub systems, heart lungs etc but the brain and the "freewill consciousness" that defines the individual, I dont think thats something we can or perhaps even should attempt.
 
Monkey Puzzle said:
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.
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Assuming we can simulate 10^4 today and computing capacity doubles every 18 months then it only takes 36 years to be able to simulate 10^11. Sure there are other factors - but just looking at the quantitative complexity it's in reach.
 
My limited knowledge of AI (first year at uni did some Cyb courses as part of a Comp Sci degree) tells me that neural nets do a fairly good job at approximating real neurons, but they're simpler and slower.

Two thoughts:

People spent hundreds of years trying to replicate a bird's method of flight until one day we came up with the fixed wing. Does AI need the same treatment? Is it impossible to fully replicate in hardware the workings of a human brain and is there an alternative method towards intelligence?

Is there something special, a spark or key factor (be it biological or spiritual) that separates a collection of circuits from concious thought? Would even processing power exceeding the capabilities of the human brain be capable of it?
 
SiD the Turtle said:
Is there something special, a spark or key factor (be it biological or spiritual) that separates a collection of circuits from concious thought? Would even processing power exceeding the capabilities of the human brain be capable of it?
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I dont think theres a particularly special reason we have a consciousness and my intel box sat next to me doesnt, the capacity of the brain is something that most people underestimate. At the same time the electro chemical response are (as I understand it) not actually *that* quick. From what I remember of my biology, its real genius lies in the fact that a neuron could be considered to be something entirely unspecial, but millions of the things all joined up with the capability of forming pathways for storage is something a bit special.

We learn through reaction but also have a core set of instincts we just "know" to be correct (breathing, running away from a big hungry tiger etc) that are the result of millions of years of our ancestors learning things for us.

I mean if we produced a working model of a neuron and then packed a couple of million of em into a football sized bag and rammed it in an artifical biological representation of an Aibo and set it down on a new world and came back in a few million years... presuming some angry martian blob hadnt rolled over it, theres a good chance that what we left there may by that point be a 6ft (wifi enabled) aibo descendant with its own set of instincts and capability to learn.

But thats not what we want to do, we want to mimick our millions of years of instincts in an artificial form and that means we have to fundamentally understand it all, that is where the impossibility lies, instincts make up the being and they *have* to be a result of evolution in my opinion.

We could make Data's and Daneel's etc etc but a "true" artificially produced intelligence? We dont have the patience :)
 
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