IBM takes a (feline) step toward thinking machines
IBM simulates a cat’s cerebral cortex using a supercomputer. The numbers are staggering: using almost 150,000 processors and 144 terabytes of memory, the program simulated the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses (connections between neurons) of a cat’s brain. Even with this massive processing power, the simulation ran a hundred times slower than a real cat’s brain. (The researchers fed the artificial brain images of corporate logos. If I were a brain in a vat, I’d want my fantasy world to be a little livelier.)
A deeper question is whether this kind of simulation is telling us anything new. It seems — and this is, of course, extremely speculative, as is everything regarding actual artificial intelligence — entirely possible that we could duplicate a human brain in silicon, yet come no closer to understanding the brain’s operation. AI might be useful, but will it ever satisfy our very human curiosity about how and why stuff, in this case, the mind, works? Who knows. When dealing with the nature of consciousness, very little is certain.
