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Comment by tkel | Hacker News Reader

Once you understand how complex the human brain is, with 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, formed over billions of years of evolution, comparing that to the machines we have built makes them seem silly and extremely simple in comparison.

Psycho-history is fiction. You're not going to be able to model a single human much less millions of humans and their environments.

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> Psycho-history is fiction. You're not going to be able to model a single human much less millions of humans and their environments.

Of course it is fiction, but to be precise, within that fiction it was also stated that it's not possible to model a single human; the whole idea was that large societies of humans behave statistically in a predictable way, exactly because then non-predictability of any individual human becomes statistically irrelevant.

> Psycho-history is fiction. You're not going to be able to model a single human much less millions of humans and their environments.

Also it didn’t even work in the original fiction. If it did, there would be no story to tell.

I often wonder how much of the human brain is actually dealing with "thinking", by that I mean navigating, understanding complex systems, and what is there to keep you alive, walking and breathing.

The machine doesn't need this extra cruft.

Why do you think you need to do brain simulation to proxy human behavior?

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