[LINK] AmA by computational neuroscientists behind 'the world's largest functional brain model'

Not sure if this has been covered on LW, but it seems highly relevant to WBE development. Link here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/147gqm/we_are_the_computational_neuroscientists_behind/

A few questioners mention the Singularity and make Skynet jokes.

The abstract from their paper in Science:

A central challenge for cognitive and systems neuroscience is to relate the incredibly complex behavior of animals to the equally complex activity of their brains. Recently described, large-scale neural models have not bridged this gap between neural activity and biological function. In this work, we present a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain (called “Spaun”) that bridges this gap by exhibiting many different behaviors. The model is presented only with visual image sequences, and it draws all of its responses with a physically modeled arm. Although simplified, the model captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and psychological behavior, which we demonstrate via eight diverse tasks.

I'm curious to see LWers' perspectives on the project.

Not sure if this has been covered on LW, but it seems highly relevant to WBE development. Link here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/147gqm/we_are_the_computational_neuroscientists_behind/

A few questioners mention the Singularity and make Skynet jokes.

The abstract from their paper in Science:

A central challenge for cognitive and systems neuroscience is to relate the incredibly complex behavior of animals to the equally complex activity of their brains. Recently described, large-scale neural models have not bridged this gap between neural activity and biological function. In this work, we present a 2.5-million-neuron model of the brain (called “Spaun”) that bridges this gap by exhibiting many different behaviors. The model is presented only with visual image sequences, and it draws all of its responses with a physically modeled arm. Although simplified, the model captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and psychological behavior, which we demonstrate via eight diverse tasks.

I'm curious to see LWers' perspectives on the project.

I think we need to separate the concept of whole brain emulation, from that of biology-inspired human-like AI.

This seems completely true. Part of the problem is that the media hype surrounding this stuff drops lines like this:

Spaun can recognize numbers, remember lists and write them down. It even passes some basic aspects of an IQ test, the team reports in the journal Science.... the simplified model of the brain, which took a year to build, captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and psychological behaviour... They say Spaun can shift from task to task, "just like the human brain," recognizing an object one moment and memorizing a list of numbers the next. And like humans, Spaun is better at remembering numbers at the beginning and end of the list than the ones in the middle. Spaun's cognition and behaviour is very basic, but it can learn patterns it has never seen before and use that knowledge to figure out the best answer to a question. "So it does learn," says Eliasmith.

Basically: to explain this stuff to normal readers, writers anthropomorphize the hell out of the project and you end up with words like 'intuition' and 'understanding' and 'learn' and 'remember' - which make the articles both sexier and way more misleading. The same thing happened with IBM's project and, to my understanding, the Blue Blain Project as well.

Actually I'm not sure if any of that is a problem. Spaun is quite literally "anthropomorphic" - modeled after a human brain. So it's not much of a stretch to say that it learns and understands the way a human does. I was just pointing out that the more progress we make on human-like AIs, without progress on brain scanning, the less likely a Hansonian singularity (dominated by ems of former humans) becomes. If Spaun as it is now really does work "just like a human", then building a human-level AI is just a matter of speeding it up. ... (read more)

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[LINK] AmA by computational neuroscientists behind 'the world's largest functional brain model'

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[LINK] AmA by computational neuroscientists behind 'the world's largest functional brain model'

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