Motherboard

A pretty good 17-minute documentary about the Blue Brain Project, “an attempt led by researcher Henry Markram to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level” (not synthetic as in an artificial physical object, but as in comprehensively simulated).

They’re only on rodents now, but hope to move on to cats in a few years and progress quickly from there through primates to humans within ten years. My favorite part is a discussion on the first practical experiments they hope to do with a completed rodent model: Hook in up to a little robot with sensory data streaming back into the simulation and motor instructions being executed and then pick apart the simulation to see exactly what happens when the rat golem makes decisions.“ Oh, that’s where his memory of how to get through the maze is stored.” Not really exaggerating.

The artistic flourishes at the very beginning and end are a little much, but the chunk starting around the middle is worth watching. The project director sort of defends the feasibility of the whole affair and explains what he sees at the applications for the technology involved.

There’s only a cursory reference or two to a full-scale simulation of a human brain “having an intelligence”. Not much beyond that in terms of what kind of thing it would be exactly…

So I suppose these are the folks doing the grunt work on the Kurzweil-style (Kurztyle?) singularity scenario, though I remain skeptical of how realistic/relevant the full-blown version of that future is. Nothing in this work suggests anything even remotely close to some how “scanning” and then simulating a particular already-existing human brain. A better question, I feel, is whether once well-established this technology could be used to defend the use of invasive neural prosthetics in a wider range of contexts by saying “well, it didn’t screw up the simulation”. Oh, also, ethics and such…