Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
scientificamerican.com
Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
1–10 of 64 posts
Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
#2>While he was still in Germany, his son Kai had been diagnosed with autism. As he told The Guardian in 2013, he wanted “to be able to step inside a simulation of my son's brain and see the world as he sees it.”
This is a beautiful sentiment.
Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
#3I was never satisfied with their explanation for why they had to start with the human brain rather than the brain of a MUCH simpler organism like C. elegans.
Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
#4I was never satisfied with their explanation for why they had to start with the human brain rather than the brain of a MUCH simpler organism like C. elegans.
The reason was obviously hubris combined with marketing spice appeal.
Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
#5I was never satisfied with their explanation for why they had to start with the human brain rather than the brain of a MUCH simpler organism like C. elegans.
Exactly. So much of neuroscience is still in "unknown unknown" phase, and the idea of just doing this massive interdisciplinary project to simulate a full human brain, built on the pile of sand that is any sort of "theory" of full-brain simulation ... it's like dedicating $1 billion to some dude's unpublished idea of proving P = NP. Bullshit should have been called before this ever got off the drawing board.
Sure seems like the EU has it's fair share of incompetent technocrats if you can throw $1 billion at some nonsense any handful of PhDs in the field could have told you was nonsense if you'd just picked up a phone.
Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
#6Like any project, I'm sure there are many ways it can be improved.
Still, I'd much rather see $1B spent imperfectly on something important - a thousand times over - rather than a trillion plus on the F-35, or so many of the ways governments spend money.
Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
#7IBM started questioning their funding of the project because of the lack of a success criteria.
It's cool that you have many calculations running in parallel on a super computer, and each calculation is a simplified model of a neuron, but how do you know when you've actually replicated a brain? A brain is more than a collection of neurons, they need to be connected and do something.
Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
#8I was never satisfied with their explanation for why they had to start with the human brain rather than the brain of a MUCH simpler organism like C. elegans.
The reason was obviously hubris combined with marketing spice appeal. http://nemaload.davidad.org/
Interesting link, but no update since 2013? Is it dead?
There's also http://www.openworm.org/
Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
#9I was never satisfied with their explanation for why they had to start with the human brain rather than the brain of a MUCH simpler organism like C. elegans.
Exactly. OpenWorm [1] is trying to do exactly that, emulate C. elegans, with all of 302 neurons. It doesn't work yet, but they;'re plugging along. When that problem is totally solved, and the neural model is working right, it's time to move up in complexity. Probably to lizards or birds.
About two decades ago, I heard Rod Brooks talking about building a human brain. He'd done some good artificial insects and was big on purely reactive AI. At the time, he was promoting Cog [2], as a way to get to human-level AI in one big jump. I asked "You've done an insect brain. Why not try to get to a mouse brain next?". He replied "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's greatest robot mouse." 20 years later, Brooks doesn't even have mouse-level AI, although he does have a robotic vacuum cleaner company.
A mouse has about 1g of brain mass; a human has about 1000g. But they're both mammals, with about 90% similar DNA. If someone could simulate a mouse at the neural simulation level, that would be real progress. Once you have a mouse simulation, human level is a scaling problem.
The Human Brain Project blew through a billion dollars in funding while OpenWorm is a volunteer effort. That's the real problem.
[1] http://www.openworm.org/ [2] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/c...
Re: Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong and How to Fix It
#10This passage really distills it down to the essence of what happened:
"Despite skepticism in the neuroscience community, Markram won over the people who really mattered: funders at the European Commission, who seem to have looked less closely at the proposal's scientific feasibility than at its potential economic and political payoff."