Artificial Brains
Artificial brains are a man-made machines that have the same cognitive ability as human beings.
No such machine has yet been built, but it is only a matter of time.
We can't predict when it will happen. It could happen by the year 2030, or perhaps 2050, or even later.
All we know for sure is that when it does happen it will change humanity and life on Earth forever.
Everything will be radically, unimaginably different.
This line of research is known as
Neuromorphic engineering.
BBC News article:
Neurons to inspire future computers -
Dr Thomas Wennekers from the University of Plymouth, UK building software simulations of the visual cortex.
Professor Steve Furber from Manchester, UK building a project called
Spinnaker - hardware based around Arm chips that simulates in hardware biological spiking neurons. Each processor runs about 1,000 neuron models. Current system has 8 processors, system with 16 coming soon.
Blue Brain Project - an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level. Started in May 2005 at a university in Lausanne, Switzerland. Uses a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON software, the simulation involves a biologically realistic model of neurons.
"Brains in Silicon" at Stanford University, led by Kwabena Boahen - building the
Neurogrid to simulate one million neurons and six billion synaptic connections in real time. Rivals Blue Gene's performance while consuming a million times less energy.