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Unfortunately, that's only for a number of cells equivalent to 1% of a human brain. A full brain's worth of simulation would take 2.5 days....although that much is probably not necessary. It will fall soon enough, though.
So it will take about 26.6 years before we can simulate a brain in real time, only considering Moore's Law. (Calculated this without pen and paper using my iPhone calculator, so somebody should check this ;) )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it will take about 26.6 years before we can simulate a brain in real time, only considering Moore's Law. (Calculated this without pen and paper using my iPhone calculator, so somebody should check this ;) )
Pretty much. http://wolfr.am/13dDALd
To put this claim in perspective, we are still unable to simulate a single cell by modeling everything we know from biochemistry, even if we ignore molecular dynamics. Mostly this is because we don't know what many genes and the proteins they encode do. This matters, for example, if we want to simulate neuronal plasticity or the effect of antidepressants. We're an incredibly long way from a full simulation, which wou…
To me, this mostly shows that naive beliefs about difficulty aren't really accurate ('but it should it harder to simulate a brain than a cell, because it's bigger right!').
But of course, progress is being made on simulating cells: http://lesswrong.com/lw/drk/paper_simulation_of_a_complete_c... It's a high-level enough model that you can do it with only 1 core per cell.
At what point does this become unethical (if ever)? Before you answer, please consider how certain you are that you are not a simulation. Edit: I don't know the answer, and there probably is a large gray area. But I do know this starts to make me uncomfortable the more accurate it gets. Time to go reread Egan's Axiomatic again, I guess.
Even if you are a simulation, would you prefer not to exist? What, really, is the difference between reality and a perfectly-executed simulation? It's hard to condemn one without condemning the other.
Considering we experiment on animals to reduce human suffering (heck, we kill and eat them just because they're tasty), running a tiny fraction of a simulated brain for a few subjective seconds doesn't worry me much. Of course, as computers get faster and cheaper this could become a huge issue.
It's only tangentially-related, but Robin Hanson has some good talks and papers about emulated minds. The shortest summary of his views is probably this talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qcIsjrHENU. A more in-depth version of that talk is at http://vimeo.com/9508131.
To put this claim in perspective, we are still unable to simulate a single cell by modeling everything we know from biochemistry, even if we ignore molecular dynamics. Mostly this is because we don't know what many genes and the proteins they encode do. This matters, for example, if we want to simulate neuronal plasticity or the effect of antidepressants. We're an incredibly long way from a full simulation, which wou…
I think an interesting number would be how many atoms does it take to simulate one atom reasonably well. Then you could get correct results for some ( really ) small biological functions.
At what point does this become unethical (if ever)? Before you answer, please consider how certain you are that you are not a simulation. Edit: I don't know the answer, and there probably is a large gray area. But I do know this starts to make me uncomfortable the more accurate it gets. Time to go reread Egan's Axiomatic again, I guess.
To put this claim in perspective, we are still unable to simulate a single cell by modeling everything we know from biochemistry, even if we ignore molecular dynamics. Mostly this is because we don't know what many genes and the proteins they encode do. This matters, for example, if we want to simulate neuronal plasticity or the effect of antidepressants. We're an incredibly long way from a full simulation, which wou…
To correctly model a cell you would need to simulate every atom and there are about 10^11 to 10^14 (!) of them in a single cell. I think an interesting number would be how many atoms does it take to simulate one atom reasonably well. Then you could get correct results for some ( really ) small biological functions.
Unfortunately, that's only for a number of cells equivalent to 1% of a human brain. A full brain's worth of simulation would take 2.5 days....although that much is probably not necessary. It will fall soon enough, though.
So it will take about 26.6 years before we can simulate a brain in real time, only considering Moore's Law. (Calculated this without pen and paper using my iPhone calculator, so somebody should check this ;) )
I would be very surprised if it took us another 26.6 years to simulate a brain in real-time. Maybe half of that time. And a few years later you will be able to cheaply backup your own brain in the cloud in case you have an accident.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To correctly model a cell you would need to simulate every atom and there are about 10^11 to 10^14 (!) of them in a single cell. I think an interesting number would be how many atoms does it take to simulate one atom reasonably well. Then you could get correct results for some ( really ) small biological functions.
Aren't you modeling a subset of the universe at that level? Isn't a model supposed to provide a higher level understanding/abstraction?
At what point does this become unethical (if ever)? Before you answer, please consider how certain you are that you are not a simulation. Edit: I don't know the answer, and there probably is a large gray area. But I do know this starts to make me uncomfortable the more accurate it gets. Time to go reread Egan's Axiomatic again, I guess.
I think it becomes unethical once we see strong evidence that the system could be self-aware. Before that, it's just a simulation. Simulating storm activity doesn't make it rain.
I'd rather err far on the side of assuming sentience and personhood if there is a shadow of a doubt, simulated or otherwise.