On the other hand I suppose you could replicate a brain neuron for neuron, connection by connection but can we do that for non trivial examples and what would doing so teach us?

I’m not entirely sure we can really even replicate a neuron. And even if we can, we don’t have anything like the technology needed to map a brain at that level of detail. It would be like trying to build a replica of a city down to the contents of every room in every building, but with only fuzzy satellite imagery to go on.

Stubborn attempts to build super-AIs despite serious issues ranging from basic science to social ethics and civic impacts, very often point in the direction of The Singularity as a motivating factor. This is the belief that when a super-AI is achieved, it will solve all of humanity’s problems and also make it possible for individuals to “upload” their minds to the machine and thereby achieve immortality.

I suspect there’s an element of that in the mix here.

Strictly speaking, it’s a new religion, complete with a deity (the super-AI) and a hereafter (immortality via reincarnation into silicon). When put forward as “science” it’s straight-up pseudoscience, like faith healing wrapped up in technology to make it look scientific. See also the hiring of Ray Kurzweil by Google, with a blank check to develop a God-machine.

A quick Ixquick search of “Markram + Singularity” turns up items on Singularityhub.com and Singularityweblog.com, I won’t bother pasting in the URLs here because they’ll just cause this comment to get stuck in a queue.

How it is that Markram manages to get into a position of directing a gazillion-dollar project, particularly after the Recursive Fury fiasco and other instances of less-than-stellar judgement, is beyond me.

Or perhaps the desire for silicon immortality is more pervasive than any of us realized.

(I hope he doesn’t try to publish at Frontiers without it. The Editor in Chief would have a fit.)

The image is from here: http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/Neural_Net_CPU

You might have picked, for example, the image found here:

http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2013/10/07/human-brain-project-kicks/

In some ways it is like other Big Science projects and big social projects.

The human genome project; where are the cures for all those diseases we were promised?

The war on drugs; why are illegal drugs still a problem?

The war on cancer; why isn’t cancer “cured” yet?

This isn’t being suggested because the majority of neuroscientists think it is the correct next step in neuroscience research. (sort of the way that the LHC was the correct next step that the physics community decided on). It is being suggested because those suggesting it see ways to leverage a big project like this into more $$$ and kudos for themselves, whether the project succeeds or not.