Even at Moore’s Law speeds, simulating 10^11 neurons, 10^11 glial cells, 10^15 synaptic connections, and concentrations of various neurotransmitters and other chemicals in real time or faster-than-real time is going to be expensive for a long time before it becomes cheap.
Not necessarily. If a human brain with no software tricks requires 10^20 CPS (a very high estimate), then (according to Kurzweil, take with grain of salt) the computational capacity will be there by ~2040. However, it’s certainly possible that we don’t get the software until 2050, at which point anyone with a couple hundred dollars can run one.
Depends on which details actually need to be simulated. I suspect that most intracellular activity can be neglected or replaced with some simple rules on when a cell divides, adds a synapse, etc.
For the record, this is something I don’t have much confidence in—WBE requires a sufficiently detailed brain scan, computers of sufficient processing power to run the simulation, and enough knowledge of brains on the microscopic level to program a simulation and understand the output of the simulation. I do not know which will turn out to be the bottleneck in the process.
Most technological developments seem to go from “We don’t know how to do this at all” to “We know how to do this, but actually doing it costs a fortune” to “We know how to do this at an affordable price.” WBE could be an exception, though, and completely skip over the second stage.
So you expect that WBE will become possible before cheap supercomputers?
You might like to quantify “cheap” and “super”.
See reply to CronoDAS below.
Even at Moore’s Law speeds, simulating 10^11 neurons, 10^11 glial cells, 10^15 synaptic connections, and concentrations of various neurotransmitters and other chemicals in real time or faster-than-real time is going to be expensive for a long time before it becomes cheap.
Not necessarily. If a human brain with no software tricks requires 10^20 CPS (a very high estimate), then (according to Kurzweil, take with grain of salt) the computational capacity will be there by ~2040. However, it’s certainly possible that we don’t get the software until 2050, at which point anyone with a couple hundred dollars can run one.
Depends on which details actually need to be simulated. I suspect that most intracellular activity can be neglected or replaced with some simple rules on when a cell divides, adds a synapse, etc.
For the record, this is something I don’t have much confidence in—WBE requires a sufficiently detailed brain scan, computers of sufficient processing power to run the simulation, and enough knowledge of brains on the microscopic level to program a simulation and understand the output of the simulation. I do not know which will turn out to be the bottleneck in the process.
It looks like “enough knowledge of brains on the microscopic level to program a simulation” might be the limiting factor.
In which case, we have a hardware overhang and an explosive em transition.
Most technological developments seem to go from “We don’t know how to do this at all” to “We know how to do this, but actually doing it costs a fortune” to “We know how to do this at an affordable price.” WBE could be an exception, though, and completely skip over the second stage.