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Human Brain Project Needs Artificial Brains to Understand Real Ones
If neuroscientist Henry Markram had a dollar for every neuron he wants to map, he still wouldn't have enough money.
As it happens, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) researcher has a billion euros, or $1.38 billion, from the European Union to spend over the next ten years, but the normal means of determining a neuron's activity can cost $1 million and take a year. By the time he got through the 3000-odd pathways shown in the photograph of a pinhead-sized slice of brain behind him in a conference room last month, he'd be flat broke, decades older, and he'd still have to map countless more pinheads' worth of neurons to understand the brain.
As Markram has been telling everyone since he got the €1 billion nod to lead the Human Brain Project, the way researchers study the brain needs to change. His approach—and it's not the only one—stands on an emerging type of computing that he and others claim will let machines learn more like humans do. They could then offer generalizations from what's known about a handful of neural pathways and find shortcuts to understanding the rest of the brain, he argues. The concept will rely as much on predictions of neural behavior as on experimental observations.
Yet such predictions will have to come from people until they can better train their computers to do it. So-called cognitive computing, which relies on recognizing elements of a familiar thing in new settings, is difficult to achieve through the kind of raw calculation to which most supercomputers are suited. It's not like winning at chess or even "Jeopardy!", two tasks IBM machines have mastered. But IBM researchers are already turning Watson, the supercomputer that beat "Jeopardy!", into a recipe-remixing machine, and they are sure to program it for other tasks that require massive data sifting and some level of semantic analysis.
That's the direction Markram expects computing to go for biologists, who need their computers to think more like people do. Human intelligence seems to rely on the art of the analogy, as Douglas Hofstadter writes in his new book on artificial intelligence, which James Somers explores at length in The Atlantic this month. That's why CAPTCHAS have been so hard to defeat: the letters are easy for a computer to learn but difficult to recognize out of context. Yet we can quickly hypothesize what's important enough about a letter to recognize it when it is distorted.
Markram is counting on those computing capabilities to improve over the course of the project, he says. He's also counting on being able to persuade his colleagues that such computer-generated hypotheses about neural behavior will be good enough to start making higher-level hypotheses about the brain's emergent structures. The computer they will use, an updated version of the Blue Brain project's Swiss-owned IBM Blue Gene, will use a hybrid memory approach, which is handy for keeping massive datasets close to the processors, but it does not yet offer any special artificial intelligence.
In the meantime Markram is focusing his efforts on another kind of computing: cultural. A major element of the Human Brain Project is the ability to unite researchers around common problems and share questions,findings, and interpretations: "we're basically layering social networking on top of neuroscience," Markram says.
But he will have a lot of persuading to do. One colleague told The Observer; "whatever your take is on Big Neuro, do not expect them to make good on all their promises to find causes, let alone cures, for any of the big neuro diseases they list in 10 years, and as for new computing technologies? They are pulling your leg."
To his credit, Markram did not oversell cures to diseases during a conversation with journalists earlier this month shortly after the project's formal launch. He also gave a realistic reply to a question about whether cognitive findings from the brain project could change the way supercomputing is done: the short version is "not yet."
Instead, the remarkable thing about the Human Brain Project may not be its computing power so much as its convening power. The social networking layer, Markram says, "is designed for tens of thousands of scientists to be able to collaboratively work on unifying all the knowledge that we have about the brain."
Photo: Swiss National Supercomputing Center
Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/innovation/human-brain-project-needs-artificial-brains-to-understand-real-ones
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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