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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

  > And it's coming a lot sooner than people think.

This is an indicator you hardly understan the science behind it. We barely have any understanding how brain works, so even if singularity is possible it is very very far away.

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Broad understanding of how the brain functions it not necessary (and would not be sufficient) to replicate it. To make a model of a brain that runs on a computer, we only need to be able to replicate it's basic building blocks, and then copy the structure of a brain over.

The basic technologies to do this already exist, and are presently used to reverse engineer microchips (among other things). What you do is first freeze a brain, and then carefully slice a few micrometers off the top. Then record all the connections between neurons in the top layer. Slice another layer off and continue.

This would take a very long time, and cost hundreds of billions. It would not, however, require any advancement in technology over our present level. The key technology we presently lack is a computing substrate sufficient to run the simulated brain.

To make a physics analogy, I don't need to understand gas laws to reproduce them by simulating newtonian mechanics.

That's one approach, but I don't think there's any evidence that you would end up with a working brain at the end, let alone a copy of the individual you started with. And good luck finding a volunteer. :)

The brain's functionality is not just due to the physical connections between neurons, it's the chemical and electrical connections as well, operating on various simultaneous levels (that is, the frequency of firing as well as the strength of firing of neurons matters). A frozen brain isn't working, and you need to copy all that stuff too, and the technology to do that doesn't exist. We can barely measure it, let alone reproduce it.

I don't think you can say that a thorough understanding of all those multiple levels of complexity in the brain just isn't necessary. I really don't think it is that easy.

Someone might have said the same thing about molecular biology before watson+crick. Neuroscience has been growing with leaps and bounds in the past decade, and, exactly because it is still in its infancy there are very significant low hanging fruit to be discovered as visualization and stimulation techniques are improving and are employed to scale. It actually does look like we will be able to figure out how our brain works in a decade (decades?). Once that is figured out, we already have the computer framework to do massive simulations of the brain.

Allen himself is funding a Brain research institute, so one wonders why he's pessimistic about the future of neuroscience.

I bet, at least one brain behind the many eyes reading this, knows how human minds work - at least the significant functions.

Hey, I am talking to you! Time to speak out loud! Tell us how you function.

How we work is completely irrelevant to reaching a singularity. These arguments are like talking about how we will need only a few computers as large as cities to handle our needs or the making of OS/2 out of intel assembly.

When we have a github of standardized computations and deep learning (or evolutionary) algorithms that pull it together with no human intervention we will have the singularity. Then it can try to figure us out or do something useful instead.

It wont look magical, it wont take a huge market force, it wont answer your religious questions or guess what you are thinking... But it will change how we approach and automate solutions to what are currently intellectual problems. Reality is always mundane.

Well, that statement was a lot more correct even just a few years ago. But we're starting to get a much better grasp on it. In the past 10 years or so we have learned more about how the brain functions than in all of human history. It's true, we're not yet experts, but you're making the assumption that we need to know entirely how the human brain works in order to build something that supersedes it in capability, and this is simply untrue. I don't need to know anything about how a gasoline engine works to build a faster and more efficient electrical engine. In truth, such thinking may even impinge on my ability to do so. The singularity isn't about creating a human brain in chips, it's about a point when the chips are able to process more than our brains are capable. What forms that takes and consequence of that is simply unforeseeable. Simple math proves it's coming.

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