Comment on Open Thread, February 1-14, 2013

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:16:45 GMT

They are very careful to not mention certain things in their video: nothing involving the computational nature of the human identity / "consciousness". Nothing we would call "whole brain emulation".

I have little doubt that what they choose to mention, and what they choose not to mention, in their video is driven more by signalling considerations than by what they consider to be technologically (in)feasible. Can they do what they claim? Create a model of the human brain detailed enough to obtain non-trivial information about brain diseases and computational processes used in the brain, but coarse enough to not have moral implications? Of course I do not know the answer to this question.

Kurzweil, who is widely agreed to be rather optimistic in his predictions, predicts

By the mid 2020s, it is conservative to conclude that we will have effective models of the whole brain

Discuss