Director of the Blue Brain Project, claims that an artificial human brain will be possible within 10 years.
I have 1 friend that finds that impossible. He knows worlds more than I about software, so I’ll give him that. Personally though, while I do think this will eventually happen, I have to chalk this announcement to research grant fishing. 10 years is far enough away to think that anything can be possible, but close enough to think about planning for an investor interested in applications.
Most importantly, the claim is shocking enough to attract discussion of what to do with such a device/mind/person/thing. How much of what we are is based on where we came from? What exactly constitutes sentience? What biases would such a device with experiences of X have verses experiences of Y? Would it be ethical to reformat such a device if its programming becomes unusable to the owner? Would such a device tend toward anything religious in nature?
God did not make it, man did. So then if we take that to mean it does not deserve respect, would biological human clones deserve respect? There are decades of literature on this, but these issues still aren’t resolved. Is it possible these issues still won’t be resolved when the time comes to interact with such a being?
How would this impact the workforce? I’ve blogged in the past about the ‘knowledge economy’ and how the truly valuable resource in such an economy is not what you know, but how you use it. In a world of unlimited access to information, sound judgment becomes the resource of value. Will that ‘judgment’ be replicable with an artificial (programmable?) human brain?
