[lrh9]

I did, and I quite thoroughly enjoyed its portrayal of people facing heavy hitting issues involving a.i., what makes something human, how far people are willing to go to defend and recover what they love, right and wrong, religion, crime, politics, racial inequality, the meaning of life, family, and more.

[Freddy]

I have now - looks good too    Thanks.

[wgb14]

I always thought that the Caprica/Terminator/etc etc day will come fromt he USA. Apparently not.

The Blue Brain Project is an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level.
The aim of the project, founded in May 2005 by the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland, is to study the brain's architectural and functional principles. The project is headed by the Institute's director, Henry Markram. Using a Blue Gene supercomputer running Michael Hines's NEURON software, the simulation does not consist simply of an artificial neural network, but involves a biologically realistic model of neurons.[1][2] It is hoped that it will eventually shed light on the nature of consciousness[citation needed].

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project

The relevant article I read on the Focus explains that at the moment with the fastest supercomputer on the planet the project can accurately simulate the brain of a rat. For human brain computations they will need computation at the magnitude of exa-flops. They are saying as the computer power increases every 10 years, simulating the human brain will be a reality in the next 10 years. My question is the following:

Lets say that this becomes true, what stops them from connecting this brain to the WWW? If this thing has the capacity of super-fast learning which will probably have, what stops it from downloading the totality of human knowledge to its brain, experience the horrors of humanity (wars, hunger, etc) and decides (as a superinteliigence) that it wants to protects us all. I know what i am saying sounds like a Scifi scenario (something close to irobot) but do you think it can become reality?

[lrh9]

Probably. That's why I hate evolutionary approaches to a.i. You can't predict it, so you can't control it. Hopefully they would have enough sense not to plug it up.