http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/...ience/nature/7740484.stm

tell me they dont already have one

I like the picture of the cat using the computer. I heard they put their half-scale prototype in the cat's head, then put the cat's brain in your ex-president's empty cranium, in return for the government contract.

Notice who is funding it.
US defence agency Darpa.

This is great, just fucking great. We need to take these bastards out before it's too late.

What new machines will they create to control us?

Hopfully it doesnt turn out to be like the matrix

exactly what I was thinking, Reborn.

and this, cognitive computing? that's just kitty play, compared to what's just over the horizon... mainstream quantum computing.
orders of magnitudes faster than supercomputers.

http://www.sciencedaily....2008/11/081120130601.htm

qubits >> binary bits

DARPA is funding many projects like this. In one project researchers are implanting micro-electrodes into monkey brains and training the monkeys to move a robotic arm with their minds. In one demonstration they had the monkey immobilized and performing complex operatins with the arm thousands of miles away via internet.

DARPA wants power-armor and semi-autonomous killer-drones. It's cool though because as a by-product we all get to learn how the brain works. And if the promise of quantum computing comes true we'll be able to miniaturize this stuff. Probably make a network that is more complex and adaptable then a human brain fit into half the volume.

Like the article says the interatctions are very simple. There are binary synapses and graded synapses. Most synapses use only one transmitter. Now the challenge is modelling trillions of these at once.

I have a real problem with this kind of stuff and I don't think computer will ever be more "inteligent" because they lack free will.

Killer-drones and mind-controlled power armor wearing robitic super solider are cool?

And they did similar things to cat's as far as i know.
These people have no idea what they're doing. They think they understand how the brain works when they manage to decode signals in a monkey's visual cortex.
That a computer could be more intelligent than any human being, i don't doubt (dependant on how you define intelligence, as well).
But that these people have the slightest clue to what they're doing i don't believe.
Anybody who would truly understand what a human mind, or any type of mind is, would not want to be part of this sort of projects unless he would be totally insane in a creepy sort of way.

lol, The cool part will be the fundamental knowlege byproducts of this kind of work not the actual military or economic implementations. But they could be cool too: whaddabout a Gundam that could carry you into outer space? Badass.

The thing to remember is that these projects are not being carried out by creepy undergound supersecret military types. Most of it is being done by Ph.D. students in well funded academic laboratories. These people know how doomed their mission to understand the brain is. They look for 'low-hanging' fruit and/or try to be inventive like all scientists.

This project is not trying to do anything creepy really. The problem is that we have a very hard time understanding the mechanistic underpinnings of human volition, creativity and concious awareness. It has been speculated that these things might be too complex for a single human brain to understand.

One way around this is to build models of these things in teams. The structure of DNA was deduced through model-building based on slim experimental evidence. councious thught is a far more complex and temporally dynamic structure but maybe it can be modeled too? Can't prove that it's impossible so why not try. The coding for adaptive networks has been invented we just need the right models and enough transistors.

Or maybe we are that experiemnt and exogenous tryptamines are glitches in the programming. Who knows

If there is a god in the monotheistic sense, then yes I think that would be his plan.
I think using killer robots for war is very unethical. They'd go wrong, be indiscriminate if autonomous. Or if controlled remotely, the controller would be less discriminate due to his removal, it would feel more like a computer game so sympathy would be reduced. Then again, at least robots don't rape women or children like soldiers do.

idk, you gotta start somewhere. I sorta think non-intrusive high resolutiuon imaging of consious human subjects is goanna be where the money is but the electorphysiological network people have their place too. Different tools for different scales. Eventually the computer model paople will have to bridge these two universes.

This is what scares me: What if the mechanisms underlying human conciouss awareness and volitional action are not just too complex for comprehension but they are orders of magnitude beyond this threshold. If this proves true then there are serious consequences. 1: Kant was right, lets all fold up out probing, seeking cuiriosity about the nature of ourselves tents and go home. We really can't know. Kinda grim. 2: We have a machine that understands us much better then we physically can. I don't trust it.

Still, I dont think humanity should give up on understanding the nature of mind and let these things be the sole realm of speculation and superstition.

Just to add: One of the results of Darpa funded research is: *tamtamtam* The Internet! So, it's not like playing doomsday all off the time.

And this computer brain-like model is combining several already researched components into one big model. The results from this research could not only lead to "killer-robots" but more likely lead to a better understanding of the brain, which in turn could lead to better treamment of several brain disfunctions like cluster headaches and migraine and maybe even epilepsy, autism and low-IQ.

Remember that there is no such thing as black and white, it's all shades of grey and who knows, also some DMT-like colors.

always with the bright side

The scary part is; 1- when they conduct experiments with animals, wich is just unethical 2- when they use real neurons to create a 'neural computer'.
'Killer drones', or whatever you want to call this sci-fi obsession, the military has, will be built anyway, regardless of there being neurocomputers or regular computers. (the difference may be that the ones running on windows just crash 20 times a day, while the others will maybe start doing the macarena in the middle of a fight, because they're bored with all this warfare:lol
But since we don't realy know what consciousness is exactly, the possibility that a bio-computer build with real neurons would at some moment posses some sort of consciousness, is something we cannot exclude. Maybe it would be a very simple animalistic sort of consciousness, but that can not be an excuse. An enslaved mind of any sort is even more creepy to me than the original frankenstein.