Comments on: Billion-euro brain simulation and graphene projects win European funds

By: Kb

Kb — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:55:18 +0000

What about some critical thinking fellas? As a cognitive scientist working for almost 20 years, I can’t see that functional reductionism has brought us any breakthroughs. This is just more of the same as strong AI of the 60′s and 70′s but with the wishful thinking that stronger computers will give us the answer. Almost makes you wanna wish that the answer will be 42.
All the new insights in the past decades have come from empirical lab work, such as Elizabeth Gould’s work showing adult neurogenesis and recent work showing the involvement of immune glia cells in pain. There is much more to learn on a basic level and this project is premature and will lead to the drying up of funds for programs that can actually advance our knowledge.

By: Nebby1989

Nebby1989 — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 22:28:51 +0000

Check out the TED talk on the Blue Brain Project ( now known as the Human Brain Project). They do state that they hope to create a full working human brain. In the talk they mention how neurons use a set of algorithms in order to “know” how to connect with each other. Using these algorithms they can model the whole brain without having to copy any individual(s) brain(s). The talk was released a little over a year ago and the presenter stated that he hoped in 10 years they could have a hologram run by the artificial brain to talk to the audience.

By: Mr.X

Mr.X — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:06:47 +0000

* would become obsolet because of this.Menial workers may also become obsolet due to other developments.

By: Mr.X

Mr.X — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 19:06:14 +0000

By the way you (probably) perceived his comment, you should have been able to tell (believing in your perception) that he is not among those that would become obsolet.

No offense intended!

By: godot

godot — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 08:10:41 +0000

Fantastic news! All humans being paid for intellectual or information processing endeavors will be obsolete by 2025. What are YOU going to do to support yourself, Mr. Naievete?

By: Vladislav

Vladislav — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:04:16 +0000

Yes, it is naive to expect that they will create an intelligent, conscious machine, it is more likely that the project can be seen as a turning point in time to a future better understanding of the brain.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 17:12:23 +0000

America is Sparta – War, War, War
Europe is Athens – Science, Art, Culture

By: Antenna

Antenna — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:09:31 +0000

Great ! So now this film project is getting really interesting : http://bluebrainfilm.com/bb/ The “Year 3″ episode already tells a lot about the different approaches, and why Markram’s one is better than Seung’s.

By: Ashley

Ashley — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 10:31:05 +0000

Imagine how fast it would be trained though. A baby with access to the internet and perfect memory.

By: andmar74

andmar74 — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:23:32 +0000

As I understand it, the blue brain is put together from data based upon many human brains, so it’s not a copy of one brain. That would probably mean that it doesn’t know anything, and needs to be trained like a baby. It’s far from clear that it can be trained.

Whittaker, you are right, but that is not the blue brain project.

By: Whittaker

Whittaker — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 08:45:41 +0000

I mean, if we have a computer simulation of the brain that has sufficiently high definition, and include sufficiently large amount of details, won’t that be indistinguishable from a actual brain?

By: Whittaker

Whittaker — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 08:34:20 +0000

If something walks lke a brain and quacks like a brain, it is a brain.

By: andmar74

andmar74 — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 06:18:41 +0000

Ah, but the blue brain project is about simulating the brain in the hope of finding out more about diseases. When turned on it will (probably) not suddenly become conscious. It’s just one step of many towards the Human-level AI, but an important one ( I think, difficult to say for a layman :-) )

By: Publius

Publius — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 04:03:45 +0000

So the EU places a half-billion Euro bet that Paul Allen’s lame and uninformed criticism of Ray’s singularity timeline is wrong. Care to call that bet, Mr. Allen??

By: Heartland

Heartland — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 02:02:41 +0000

Fantastic news. The knowledge of how the brain works is coming and, with it, knowledge of how intelligence works, which should be available well before the whole brain is mapped so probably before 2020.

By: your name

your name — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:38:43 +0000

These were the two projects I wanted to win. Nice.

By: R. Wolf

R. Wolf — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:11:08 +0000

Emphasis on the “may” and less on the ‘mindchildren’, that sounds a little kooky even for me, and I’m a huge fan of this project & the singularity community in general. This is certainly a step in the right direction, but even if totally successful it will only really be another tool in the toolbox for further research into brain function. We could tweak and test and change things to figure out how it all works to a deeper and more precise level than we can in real brains, but I imagine it would still be a while before we understand enough to really engineer intelligence, ramp up the parts that make it ‘smarter’ and have it really surprise us with super-human cognition. But totes cool nonetheless! Good to know other people are excited about this too.

By: Percival

Percival — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:43:00 +0000

Henry Markram and his team are working hand in hand with IBM and its Blue Gene project. You could almost say that this funding insures that they will have a supercomputer running a full human brain simulation by the early 2020s.

By: H.K. Fauskanger

H.K. Fauskanger — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:50:18 +0000

I’ve been crossing my fingers for the Human Brain Project for over a year now, so this is a great relief! If one has a reductionist view of the brain (and I do), this painstaking bottom-up approach may finally give us fully conscious computers with human-level intelligence (or greater!) Will we see the “birth” of our long-awaited mindchildren in the 2020s?

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:19:52 +0000

Very exciting news. Hopefully we will have a more robust understanding of how the mind works and what causes disease states instead of abstract theories.

Good to hear about graphene. Hope this material doesn’t end up being a let down though…..for continuing Moore’s law.

By: Publius

Publius — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:47:59 +0000

So psyched HBP won! The Singularity is near!

By: someday69

someday69 — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 16:54:54 +0000

maybe this will spur,another big brain project in the states? Or china,,or japan’or……

By: Jay

Jay — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:10:24 +0000

I had forgotten all about this. But I’m happen to see the money went to the brain project!

By: Gorden Russell

Gorden Russell — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 13:27:52 +0000

But why was there no mention that graphene will be used for reverse osmosis?

By: sam

sam — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 13:07:05 +0000

GREAT! much deserved, congrats Henry. Let’s see what you can do in 10 years with enough funds.

By: Editor

Editor — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 13:00:45 +0000

Agreed. These two research programs are directly targeted to accelerating intelligence.

By: JohnsonJohn

JohnsonJohn — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:05:46 +0000

I was looking at this for the past year, waiting and re-checking every month to see if it was announced who won.

I said Graphene and BBP should win, and it did! Science has won this day.

By: John

John — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:28:40 +0000

AWESOME!! Go Team Henry!