Economist Robin Hanson suspects that the world economy may soon be doubling every week or two. He arrived at that suspicion based on historical extrapolations, but he also has a theory as to how it might happen: the development, in the near future, of intelligent machines.
According to Hanson, efforts to computationally model the human brain, neuron by neuron, could reach fruition within the next 25 to 50 years. He plays pretty fast and loose with the details, though, so let’s take a closer look at the bleeding edge of the field.
The mother of all brain simulation projects is Blue Brain, a joint project of IBM and Ecole Polytecnique Fédérale de Lausanne (a Swiss town also known for its lower tech, but tastier, fondue). Announced with much fanfare in 2005, Blue Brain has as its anything-but-modest mission to create a complete and exhaustively accurate simulation of the human brain within a decade or so. They figure they can knock out the neo-cortex in the next few years.
Somebody buy these guys a calculator.
The current Blue Brain hardware has 8,000 processors and they have apparently set it up so that one chip models one or two neurons. That has allowed them, as of this month, to model a 10,000 neuron grouping called a “column.” That’s hugely impressive. But, umm, 10,000 down, 99,999,990,000 to go.
The human brain is estimated to have about 100 billion neurons, so they’re going to need another 10 million or so Blue Brain computers to finish the job given the current specs. They’re having a tough time convincing the Swiss government to spring for another one or two of them.
Mind you, computer processing power per dollar has been increasing exponentially over time since the earliest electromechanical computers. So maybe, in a generation, we’ll be revisiting this question. But that’s an awfully big maybe.
It seems doubtful that we’ll be able to create Marvin the paranoid android any time this century. And it’ll be some time after that before the technology is commercialized and we all have “plastic pals” who are “fun to be with!”
So keep contributing to that 401K. It’s gonna be a while before it starts doubling every week or two.
