House Willis

The Cat is Indeed Out of the Bag

Back in July of 2007 I wrote an entry titled The Rise of the Machines. In that entry I wrote about the concept of a technological singularity. At the end of the article I mentioned that I didn't buy into this vision of the future. I also mentioned that the belief in this vision bordered on being a kind of religion.

As time passed, having long forgotten about writing this entry, I wrote another similar entry on the technological singularity - this time almost a year later in June of 2008. I just read that entry again for the first time since I wrote it (about a year and a half ago). At the end of that article I mentioned that I thought the Singularity was a possibility.

Apparently, I'm slowly being convinced (and maybe convincing myself) that at some point technology is going to supercede our ability to control it. Today, I write another entry along this trend. This one is motivated by a research paper I read a few weeks ago titled TheCatIsOutofTheBag.pdf.

The authors of the paper are from IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, where they used one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to simulate the way that a brain works, at the scale of the computing power of a cat's brain - hence the title of the paper.

However, the paper was clearly given this title for a couple other reasons. I won't go into the publicity-related reason, but the other reason portends the importance of the breakthroughs they've made in their research: harnessing enough computer power to perform cognitive computing at this scale, and using diffiusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) to "non-invasivley measure the human white matter network across the entire brain".

What this means is that they have developed a process by which they can easily "dissect" the human brain, learn about how it works, model it, and simulate it using a computer. The researcher's blog entry on the release of the paper is here.

It should be clarified that what they have NOT done is actually simulate a cat's brain. In fact, a number of other researchers, most notably at the Blue Brain Project have taken exception to the loose wording that has been used by the media in reporting on the IBM team's research paper release.

I read an article on the Blue Brain Project earlier this year, around the beginning of this summer. In many ways its an even more impressive project. The brains (the human brain, that is) behind the project is a man by the name of Henry Markram, pictured to the right in this entry.

If you have time this article is very much worth the read. It describes the potential of what Markram and team are working towards without getting you mired in the technical details. I've plucked a couple interesting quotes from the article and placed them below:

The Blue Brain project is now at a crucial juncture. The first phase of the project--"the feasibility phase"--is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? "When I say everything, I mean everything," he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.

In other words, the Blue Brain project isn't just a model of a neural circuit. Markram hopes that it represents a whole new kind of neuroscience. "You need to look at the history of physics," he says. "From Copernicus to Einstein, the big breakthroughs always came from conceptual models. They are what integrated all the facts so that they made sense. You can have all the data in the world, but without a model the data will never be enough."

Speaking about how Blue Brain is different from other approaches that have been used to study the brain, Markram notes: "But none of these methods allows us to see what makes the cortex so interesting, which is that it generates worlds. No matter how much I know about your brain, I still won't be able to see what you see."

...and my favorite: Once the team is able to model a complete rat brain--that should happen in the next two years--Markram will download the simulation into a robotic rat, so that the brain has a body. He's already talking to a Japanese company about constructing the mechanical animal. "The only way to really know what the model is capable of is to give it legs," he says. "If the robotic rat just bumps into walls, then we've got a problem."

When I think about the trajectory that we are clearly on with respect to technology, our understanding of the brain, and the potential we have to create something that is intelligent and possibly is even conscious, a couple things come to mind immediately. I wonder first what the world will be like for Porter and Fallon. They will most certainly be alive to see these wonders become reality. What will their lives be like. What kind of world will their children experience?

I think about how much this could change our world, our selves and society. We're taking these steps now but we really have no idea of the long term consequences, or, really, wher e they will lead. Are we indeed letting the "cat out of the bag" as I write this?

Lastly, I wonder whether I'll be alive to see these changes? Thirty years from now Toni and I will be in our 70's. I thin that our world even by then will be a hugely different place than where we are now. I can imagine that we'll still be alive by then, assuming we take good care of ourselves and each other. But will we have created a new conscious being by then?

I do hope that these new beings do exist in my life time. My first fascinations with computers (back in sixth and sevent grade - 1979/80) revovled around their ability to be used in creating alternate and virtual realities (text adventure games and video games). Part of that fascination was realizing the limits of technology due to the severly mediocre types of intelligence that could be simulated in these virtual realities.

From that point on I've always been interested in artificial intelligence; and over the past few years I've become even more interested in studying consciousness. I've often thought that maybe I should have pursued those fields and taken a different path when I was younger - something I've always kind of regretted. And now I see the incredible research that is being done and can easily see what it will lead to...I guess it's never too late.

Cognitive computing will certainly be at the forefront of the computing world for years to come. The products that could take advantage of these new technologies will do things that I could only dream of back in the early 80's.

As I write those words I can see how the Singularity concept could become a religion to some. It's easy to get caught up in the hopes and dreams of something different...totally different.