Tag: neuroscience

Interview on Singularity Weblog

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zISzqmtojD8#t=1036[/embed] This week I interviewed with Nikola Danaylov, the creator of Singularity Weblog.  It was great fun, and quite an honour to follow in the footsteps of his 160-plus previous guests. We talked about hope and optimism as a useful bias, about the promise and peril of AGI, about whether automation will end work and force the introduction of universal basic income ... and of course about Pandora's Brain.

Terminator or Transcendence?

Yesterday I participated in an online discussion of the movie Transcendence, along with Nikola Danaylov, the "Larry King" of transhumanism, and Stuart Armstrong of the Oxford Institute for the Future of Humanity.  The debate was chaired by David Wood, chair of the London Futurist Group. The video is here: Terminator ot Transcendence?  

Stephen Hawking joins the debate

Stephen Hawking has joined the small group of people sounding the alarm about the possibility of super-intelligence arriving in the next few decades. In a blog in the Huffington Post, he and three American professors at MIT and Berkeley warn that it "would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever ... to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction." "Artificial intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly," the post continues, arguing that Watson's Jeopardy success and self-driving cars " will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring. ... Success in creating AI...
Movie review: “Transcendence”

Movie review: “Transcendence”

It was keenly awaited by people interested in the possible near-term arrival of super-intelligence, but Transcendence has opened to half-empty cinemas and terrible reviews - at the time of writing it has a 20% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The distributors kept changing the release date, which might indicate they realised the film wouldn't open with a splash, but that they hope it could grow to become a cult classic.  Sadly, I doubt it.  Sadly, because in some ways Transcendence is a fine film with great ambitions.  For me it is one of the best science fiction films of recent...

The EU and the USA to build a brain together

The world's two biggest brain mapping projects are to join forces.  The EU's €1bn Human Brain Project (HBP) and the United States’ $1bn BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) will start to collaborate later this year. Details are yet to be provided, but the effort will start this summer and will include all of the BRAIN Initiative's government partners — the NIH (National Institutes of Health), the NSF (National Science Foundation) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Henry Markram, who directs the HBP at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), says that Israel's brain...

"Transcendence": 2-minute mini-feature

The director, writer, producer and stars of "Transcendence" talk here about the movie and the ideas behind it.  They all seem to think that uploading a human mind into a supercomputer is a serious possibility.  Paul Bettany reports neuroscientists at CalTech telling him that it may be only 30 years away. Of course this may just be movie hype.

More funding for Obama’s BRAIN

Just under a year ago, President Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research though Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), a multi-agency project to revolutionize our understanding of the human brain.  The scale of his ambition is enormous: "There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will [do it] by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. That knowledge could be -- will be -- transformative." The spend in 2014 was $100m, and the 2015 Budget proposes...

Australia wants to join the brain-building party

The Australian Academy of Science has published a report calling for an investment of AUS$200 million over 10 years to build a computer system that has the capacity for thought and intelligent decision-making. It wants to do it the hard way. The report describes the $3bn US BRAIN initiative as seeking to map the human brain in great detail, and the $1.2bn European-led Human Brain Project as seeking to model a functioning brain. It recommends that Australia takes a different approach, by working out how the human brain generates thoughts, and then replicating this inside a computer. My layman's understanding...

Startling progress in brain simulation

Researchers claim to have modelled one percent of a human brain, taking 40 minutes to replicate one second of brain activity.  If this is true it is startling, and should be making much bigger headlines than it is. You might wonder why, given that it was only 1% of a brain, and it took so long to model just one second.  But that would be to ignore the power of exponential increase, as recorded in Moore's Law.  As a comment on Reddit pointed out, applying Moore's Law generates this forecast: Jan 2015 - 20 minutes for 1 second of 1%...

Transcendence

The trailer for an intriguing movie has just been released.  Transcendence, which opens in April 2014, stars Johnny Depp, and is directed by Wally Pfister, long-time cameraman and collaborator for Chris Nolan, the director of Inception, and the hugely successful Dark Knight trilogy.  As well as Depp, the strong cast includes Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara (House of Cards) and Rebecca Hall (Iron Man 3). This quote from the trailer explains why the movie is causing excitement among those who think that a conscious machine may be created within the next few decades. "Imagine a machine with...

Neuroscience hat trick

Three significant announcements in one week!  Neuroscience is galloping ahead, thanks to improved scanning techniques, and also to Moore's Law, which allows bigger and bigger data sets to be acquired and analysed.  You need that when you're studying the most complex thing known to man. Perhaps the most interesting of the three is a review of what happens in the brain when its owner loses consciousness.  A team at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on 12 healthy volunteers to see how information flows changed inside their brains as they lost consciousness...

Eavesdropping on the brain

Researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine claim to have identified a brain region which is uniquely responsible for mathematical thinking.  Say hello to your intraparietal sulcus, or IPS: it's what provides your numeracy (or lack of it).  The IPS is activated when (and only when) you think about numbers, including imprecise quantitative terms such as “more than”. One of the interesting aspects of this study is the unusual way the researchers obtained their data.  Brain studies are usually carried out on patients lying immobile inside MRI scanners, which are huge, clunky, and noisy machines with giant magnets.  Or they...

Alzheimer’s breakthrough?

The headlines today (10th October) suggest that a cure for Alzheimer's is imminent. Well, not quite.Scientists at the University of Leicester have arrested brain cell death from prion disease in mice.  This is reported to be the first proof that neuro-degeneration can be delayed in any living animal. Many neurodegenerative diseases involve the production of "mis-folded" proteins, or prions. In Parkinson's the alpha-synuclein protein goes wrong, in Alzheimer's it's the amyloid and tau proteins, and in Huntington's it's the Huntington protein.  The brain responds by shutting down local protein production for so long that the cells are eventually destroyed.  By targeting the...

Partial Recall

Total Recall it ain't, but it's a very small step in the same direction. False memories have been implanted into mice, scientists say. A team was able to make the mice wrongly associate a benign environment with a previous unpleasant experience from different surroundings. The researchers conditioned a network of neurons to respond to light, making the mice recall the unpleasant environment. Reporting in Science, they say it could one day shed light into how false memories occur in humans. The brains of genetically engineered mice were implanted with optic fibres in order to deliver pulses of light to their...

Minsky vs Markram

In the previous post, I mentioned that there are, broadly speaking, two main ways for us to build a human-level, conscious AI.  One is to assemble the most advanced AI systems available and have them learn, and the other is to build a model of a human brain which is as precise as we can manage, and see if it appears to exhibit consciousness. Henry Markram is doing exactly that at the Human Brain Project in Lausanne, funded to the tune of €1bn by the EU and others.  But in an interview on the Singularity 1 on 1 website, AI...