IBM's New Chip Replicates Your Brain

Trilliandi

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I hate to add to the lame shots, but computers taking over was one of those Sci-fi plots that made a whole lot of sense with the aims of technology. Therefore, when the machine armies march towards our last line of defense in the name of human freedom to rip us a new one, I want to be there with this chip's creator so I can say 'I'm not one to say I told you so, but...'
 

AbstractStream

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Well then! I think this fits just right. "So long, and thanks for all the fish. So sad that it should come to this. We tried to warn you all, but oh dear."
 

Iron Lightning

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Well, it seems like this chip may help make associations easier for computers but beyond that I don't see how its method of learning is superior to computers' current method of learning (i.e. using hard drives and RAM.) It also seems like the architecture might have the problem of "forgetting" thing because of a deactivated connection accidentally causing a disruption in a connected "memory loop."

I seriously doubt that we'll be able to create cognitive computers with the hardwired silicon chips of today. After all the only things capable of cognition (i.e. brains) are gelatinous objects where the fundamental computational units are motile and capable of receiving signals from multiple other units at once. Heck, we've even discovered a couple neurotransmitters that bond to the axon (the transmitting end of a neuron) instead of the generally receiving dendrites.

Apollo45 said:
One step closer to immortality. Refine the chip over a period of twenty years, then allow cloning of human bodies and you'll be able to download yourself in to the chip, then transfer yourself in to your new brain; instant immortality.

Hell, even if you die you can just re-download a backup copy of yourself.

I'm excited.
Man, I'm tired of hearing this fallacy. Perfect replication of humans does not grant them immortality. If I were to make a perfect clone of you would that clone be literally you? Of course not, if you die and somebody makes a copy of you then you're still dead. If you were to die your consciousness would still end and it wouldn't restart just because there is a dude out there exactly like you. Sure, I could pass your perfect clone off as you to your friends and family but it wouldn't be you, it would just be a copy.

The only way to achieve effective immortality through cloning is to physically transplant the dying person's brain into his/her new clone, and even then I'd wager the person would still lose a bit of himself/herself.
 

Apollo45

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Iron Lightning said:
Apollo45 said:
One step closer to immortality. Refine the chip over a period of twenty years, then allow cloning of human bodies and you'll be able to download yourself in to the chip, then transfer yourself in to your new brain; instant immortality.

Hell, even if you die you can just re-download a backup copy of yourself.

I'm excited.
Man, I'm tired of hearing this fallacy. Perfect replication of humans does not grant them immortality. If I were to make a perfect clone of you would that clone be literally you? Of course not, if you die and somebody makes a copy of you then you're still dead. If you were to die your consciousness would still end and it wouldn't restart just because there is a dude out there exactly like you. Sure, I could pass your perfect clone off as you to your friends and family but it wouldn't be you, it would just be a copy.

The only way to achieve effective immortality through cloning is to physically transplant the dying person's brain into his/her new clone, and even then I'd wager the person would still lose a bit of himself/herself.
Hate to say it, but you misread the post. The clone obviously isn't you, but the chip is. Instead of transplanting the brain, you download yourself in to the chip, then upload yourself (or transplant the chip) in to the new person. The chip, acting as a human brain would, is you. Hence the immortality.
 

Zeraki

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Apollo45 said:
Iron Lightning said:
Apollo45 said:
One step closer to immortality. Refine the chip over a period of twenty years, then allow cloning of human bodies and you'll be able to download yourself in to the chip, then transfer yourself in to your new brain; instant immortality.

Hell, even if you die you can just re-download a backup copy of yourself.

I'm excited.
Man, I'm tired of hearing this fallacy. Perfect replication of humans does not grant them immortality. If I were to make a perfect clone of you would that clone be literally you? Of course not, if you die and somebody makes a copy of you then you're still dead. If you were to die your consciousness would still end and it wouldn't restart just because there is a dude out there exactly like you. Sure, I could pass your perfect clone off as you to your friends and family but it wouldn't be you, it would just be a copy.

The only way to achieve effective immortality through cloning is to physically transplant the dying person's brain into his/her new clone, and even then I'd wager the person would still lose a bit of himself/herself.
Hate to say it, but you misread the post. The clone obviously isn't you, but the chip is. Instead of transplanting the brain, you download yourself in to the chip, then upload yourself (or transplant the chip) in to the new person. The chip, acting as a human brain would, is you. Hence the immortality.
But the chip still wouldn't be you really. All it would be as a copy of your true consciousness, but the original would still be dead. I don't consider it immortality if my true consciousness no longer exists.

At least that's how I see it, and that was the point Iron Lightning was trying to make.

EDIT

Now I've got the Ghost In The Shell theme stuck in my head.
 

Apollo45

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Tank207 said:
Apollo45 said:
Iron Lightning said:
Apollo45 said:
One step closer to immortality. Refine the chip over a period of twenty years, then allow cloning of human bodies and you'll be able to download yourself in to the chip, then transfer yourself in to your new brain; instant immortality.

Hell, even if you die you can just re-download a backup copy of yourself.

I'm excited.
Man, I'm tired of hearing this fallacy. Perfect replication of humans does not grant them immortality. If I were to make a perfect clone of you would that clone be literally you? Of course not, if you die and somebody makes a copy of you then you're still dead. If you were to die your consciousness would still end and it wouldn't restart just because there is a dude out there exactly like you. Sure, I could pass your perfect clone off as you to your friends and family but it wouldn't be you, it would just be a copy.

The only way to achieve effective immortality through cloning is to physically transplant the dying person's brain into his/her new clone, and even then I'd wager the person would still lose a bit of himself/herself.
Hate to say it, but you misread the post. The clone obviously isn't you, but the chip is. Instead of transplanting the brain, you download yourself in to the chip, then upload yourself (or transplant the chip) in to the new person. The chip, acting as a human brain would, is you. Hence the immortality.
But it still wouldn't be you really. All it would be as a copy of your true consciousness, but the original would still be dead. I don't consider it immortality if my true consciousness no longer exists.

At least that's how I see it, and that was the point Iron Lightning was trying to make.
Ah, apparently I misread his post. Going back over it, it makes sense to me, although I'd still argue that, being stored in a computer chip, it would be "you" transferring over. I suppose it's a matter of semantics though; if you transfer everything you are over to a chip implanted in your head, and the chip and your brain function simultaneously to be "you", wouldn't moving the chip (which is now "you", since your brain is dead) mean that you're moving with the chip? Do we actually need a brain for us to be us? What if we replaced that entire organ with a more efficient computer version, slowly replacing parts of the brain piece by piece so that at any one point except the beginning and end of the process you consist of both an organic computer and a mechanical computer? At the end, when your organic brain is gone and is replaced with a high tech computer, does that mean you are no longer "you"?

Just something to think on.
 

Canadamus Prime

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And why would we want to do this? Even disregarding all those Sci Fi movies about AI and whatever, news like this always sets off alarm bells in my head. Like do we as human beings have the wisdom and understanding required to accept the responsibility of essentially creating sentient life? My guess, no. A long noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.
 

Iron Lightning

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Apollo45 said:
Iron Lightning said:
Apollo45 said:
One step closer to immortality. Refine the chip over a period of twenty years, then allow cloning of human bodies and you'll be able to download yourself in to the chip, then transfer yourself in to your new brain; instant immortality.

Hell, even if you die you can just re-download a backup copy of yourself.

I'm excited.
Man, I'm tired of hearing this fallacy. Perfect replication of humans does not grant them immortality. If I were to make a perfect clone of you would that clone be literally you? Of course not, if you die and somebody makes a copy of you then you're still dead. If you were to die your consciousness would still end and it wouldn't restart just because there is a dude out there exactly like you. Sure, I could pass your perfect clone off as you to your friends and family but it wouldn't be you, it would just be a copy.

The only way to achieve effective immortality through cloning is to physically transplant the dying person's brain into his/her new clone, and even then I'd wager the person would still lose a bit of himself/herself.
Hate to say it, but you misread the post. The clone obviously isn't you, but the chip is. Instead of transplanting the brain, you download yourself in to the chip, then upload yourself (or transplant the chip) in to the new person. The chip, acting as a human brain would, is you. Hence the immortality.
How is the chip you? Downloading is still copying. If you download a file off of Mediafire then the original file still exists and you have merely made a copy of it.

I admit, that's a bit of a nebulous point and we really don't know enough about consciousness to know if it's just the sum of the information in one's brain. Let's suppose that it is, if that was the case transferring the information that makes up consciousness would still necessarily result in its destruction if the process is non-instantaneous. A non-instantaneous transfer rate would break up the information that makes up consciousness in to two parts, one in the brain and one in the chip. If consciousness is the sum of information in a cognitive object then the aforementioned two parts would each form into individual consciousnesses. This would cause the consciousness in the brain to cease (and therefore die) when the transfer process concludes.

The only way to transfer information instantaneously is through the use of entangled photons. However, the brain contains no entangled photons so information in the brain would have to be "downloaded" by the use of conventional electric propagation which travels very fast (at the speed of light) but not instantaneously. Of course that's making the assumption that instantaneous transfer would not kill the original consciousness, I'm not sure about that.

Even if it was magically made possible to transfer information from a brain without destroying its consciousness you'd still have to find a way around the fundamental incompatibility of information in a brain and information in a computer. The brain does not think in binary; it thinks through a multitudinous variety of neurotransmitters. While action potentials are an all-or-none affair the chemical effects of the neurotransmitters emitted into the synaptic cleft are not produce different effects in the neuron itself that are not directly related to action potentials. Neurotransmitters also affect the probability of an action potential firing (e.g. 90%, 70%, 10%) whereas a computer only deals with 100% or 0% probabilities of a signal being transmitted. I remember something in the article about the variability of "intensities" of the connections between the chip's computer cores but I'd guess that refers to the frequency of signals and not the probability of their initial transmission. Translating the brain's information into binary (if such a thing is possible, which it may not be) would effectively rewrite all the brain's information and destroy consciousness.
 

Robert Ewing

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Skynet? All we need to do now is wait until it becomes self aware, and activates 'the cleansing.'
 

Buizel91

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Rawne1980 said:
Give me that chip.

I know how to use it wisely.

I'll install it in the kettle so it knows when to have my coffee ready.
Neh, put it in a car...

It might learn how to Transform!
 

theultimateend

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Arontala said:
You people watch way too many sci-fi movies for your own good.

That was a preemptive response to the people screaming about how this will somehow lead to the vampire robot nazi zombie apocalypse.
Yeah. I would be so shocked if this turned out going horrible wrong that I think THAT would be what kills me.

Other than the Military ruining it, the actual idea is pretty amazing.

We know a lot of the cognitive biases of the Human brain, we could create thinking systems that don't share our faults. So they'd be much less likely to do retarded things like we do (such as enslavement or war).

Iron Lightning said:
Apollo45 said:
Iron Lightning said:
Apollo45 said:
One step closer to immortality. Refine the chip over a period of twenty years, then allow cloning of human bodies and you'll be able to download yourself in to the chip, then transfer yourself in to your new brain; instant immortality.

Hell, even if you die you can just re-download a backup copy of yourself.

I'm excited.
Man, I'm tired of hearing this fallacy. Perfect replication of humans does not grant them immortality. If I were to make a perfect clone of you would that clone be literally you? Of course not, if you die and somebody makes a copy of you then you're still dead. If you were to die your consciousness would still end and it wouldn't restart just because there is a dude out there exactly like you. Sure, I could pass your perfect clone off as you to your friends and family but it wouldn't be you, it would just be a copy.

The only way to achieve effective immortality through cloning is to physically transplant the dying person's brain into his/her new clone, and even then I'd wager the person would still lose a bit of himself/herself.
Hate to say it, but you misread the post. The clone obviously isn't you, but the chip is. Instead of transplanting the brain, you download yourself in to the chip, then upload yourself (or transplant the chip) in to the new person. The chip, acting as a human brain would, is you. Hence the immortality.
How is the chip you? Downloading is still copying. If you download a file off of Mediafire then the original file still exists and you have merely made a copy of it.

I admit, that's a bit of a nebulous point and we really don't know enough about consciousness to know if it's just the sum of the information in one's brain. Let's suppose that it is, if that was the case transferring the information that makes up consciousness would still necessarily result in its destruction if the process is non-instantaneous. A non-instantaneous transfer rate would break up the information that makes up consciousness in to two parts, one in the brain and one in the chip. If consciousness is the sum of information in a cognitive object then the aforementioned two parts would each form into individual consciousnesses. This would cause the consciousness in the brain to cease (and therefore die) when the transfer process concludes.

The only way to transfer information instantaneously is through the use of entangled photons. However, the brain contains no entangled photons so information in the brain would have to be "downloaded" by the use of conventional electric propagation which travels very fast (at the speed of light) but not instantaneously. Of course that's making the assumption that instantaneous transfer would not kill the original consciousness, I'm not sure about that.

Even if it was magically made possible to transfer information from a brain without destroying its consciousness you'd still have to find a way around the fundamental incompatibility of information in a brain and information in a computer. The brain does not think in binary; it thinks through a multitudinous variety of neurotransmitters. While action potentials are an all-or-none affair the chemical effects of the neurotransmitters emitted into the synaptic cleft are not produce different effects in the neuron itself that are not directly related to action potentials. Neurotransmitters also affect the probability of an action potential firing (e.g. 90%, 70%, 10%) whereas a computer only deals with 100% or 0% probabilities of a signal being transmitted. I remember something in the article about the variability of "intensities" of the connections between the chip's computer cores but I'd guess that refers to the frequency of signals and not the probability of their initial transmission. Translating the brain's information into binary (if such a thing is possible, which it may not be) would effectively rewrite all the brain's information and destroy consciousness.
OR...just create nanomachines that will repair parts of the brain that atrophy with age. Keeping your same brain but removing the degradation of time.

I'd be hard pressed to believe that we won't accomplish something this complex within my lifetime. Considering the acceleration of technology.
 

similar.squirrel

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Arontala said:
You people watch way too many sci-fi movies for your own good.

That was a preemptive response to the people screaming about how this will somehow lead to the vampire robot nazi zombie apocalypse.
Will you be my friend?
 

themerrygambit

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Am I the only one that's extremely disturbed by this. I like technological advancements and all but I'm not for artificial intelligence. Why? because I don't want robot assistants to think for me or do work for me. The last thing we need are robots to take more jobs away from people and make us lazier than we already are. We're in a world where the population is growing every day. We need more jobs not artificially intelligent robots and computers running around taking them away from people. Also once you create a thinking sentient being you can't just "undo" it without consequences. Oh yeah and then there's that whole part where they take over the world which I'm not a fan of either...