[ExI] Fwd: [Body Hacking] Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2030, Expert Predicts

[Bryan Bishop]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <tacitr at aol.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 11:55 AM
Subject: Re: [Body Hacking] Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by
2030, Expert Predicts
To: bodyhacking at lists.caughq.org



On Aug 17, 2010, at 9:15 AM, Bryan Bishop wrote:

 "Reverse-engineering the human brain so we can simulate it using
>> computers may be just two decades away, says Ray Kurzweil, artificial
>> intelligence expert and author of the best-selling book The Singularity
>> is Near.
>>
>
> Henry Markram thinks he can do it by 2018. He's probably right.
>

If he gets the funding.

Funny thing, life. I just spent the weekend in Reno with my sweetie Shelly,
who's considering moving there to do her doctorate with him working on the
Blue Brain project. The catch? He's so desperately underfunded that he can't
even afford to fund her (or any of his other grad students, for that
matter). And now that he's alienated IBM by calling them on what he
describes as a false and misleading claim to have modeled a cat's brain, he
doesn't have access to their funding or use of their Blue Gene supercomputer
any more.

This is the field that Shelly's been working in for the past few years, and
she says it's not even a matter of time 'til we can simulate a human brain
in a computer; at this point, it's merely a matter of money.

Of course, she also has a beef with Ray Kurzweil. This is something we were
talking about on the ten-hour drive from Portland to Reno. In a recent blog
post talking about brain modeling, Kurzweil claimed that computational brain
modeling problem that hundreds of thousands of scientists are working. In
reality, the number is more like seven, all of them desperately underfunded,
and all of them scraping and struggling to get together as much money as a
typical university spends in a month on its football program.

Franklin
http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html




-- 
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507
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