IBM was estimating that they’d finish building their full-scale simulation of the human brain in 10-15 years. Having a simulation where parts of a brain can be selectively turned on or off at will or fed arbitrary sense input would seem very useful in the study of intelligence. Other projections I’ve seen (but which I now realize I never cited in the actual article) place the development of molecular nanotech within 20 years or so.
Then you could make an interim prediction on the speed of these developments. If IBM are predicting a simulation of the human brain in 10-15 years, what would have to be true in 5 years if this is on track?
Same thing for nanotechnology—if those projections are right, what sort of capacities would we have in 10 years time?
But I completely agree with you about the unwisdom of using cash to back up these predictions. Since futurology speculations are more likely to be wrong than correct (because prediction is so hard, especially about the future) improving people’s prediction skills is much more usefull than punishing failure.
IBM was estimating that they’d finish building their full-scale simulation of the human brain in 10-15 years. Having a simulation where parts of a brain can be selectively turned on or off at will or fed arbitrary sense input would seem very useful in the study of intelligence. Other projections I’ve seen (but which I now realize I never cited in the actual article) place the development of molecular nanotech within 20 years or so.
Then you could make an interim prediction on the speed of these developments. If IBM are predicting a simulation of the human brain in 10-15 years, what would have to be true in 5 years if this is on track?
Same thing for nanotechnology—if those projections are right, what sort of capacities would we have in 10 years time?
But I completely agree with you about the unwisdom of using cash to back up these predictions. Since futurology speculations are more likely to be wrong than correct (because prediction is so hard, especially about the future) improving people’s prediction skills is much more usefull than punishing failure.