A pretty good 17-minute documentary about the Blue Brain Project, “an attempt to create a synthetic brain by reverse-engineering the mammalian brain down to the molecular level” (not synthetic as in an artificial physical object, but as in comprehensively simulated).
They’re only on rodents now, but hope to move on to cats in a few years and progress quickly from there through primates to humans within ten years.
Well, jeepers. My initial judgment, based on Lux’s summary alone, was that the project seemed dangerous and maybe a little evil; on closer inspection, the project seems dangerous and maybe a little evil!
- “Here’s the plan, team — we’re going to slap together a bunch of mind components until we get a working mind. No, we don’t really even plan on understanding how the relations between the components work; that’s what we’re going to figure out once we build the thing. After all, what’s the worst that could happen if you create an arbitrary human mind without having any clue what you’re actually doing?”
- It’s really not cool to fabricate a soul, keep it trapped in a box, torture it, drive it crazy, try to make it un-crazy, reboot it, etc. The fact that these dudes can be so blase about essentially printing out unpeople and using them for target practice suggests to me that they aren’t, at bottom, taking their task seriously, which is reassuring, given that the crazy monster that they’d be likely to create if they actually succeeded would probably kill us all. Not joking. Never forget about the vastness of mind-design space.
