Dear Friends,
Be Well.
David
The Brain Is Not Computable
A leading neuroscientist says Kurzweil’s
Singularity isn’t going to happen. Instead, humans will assimilate machines.
Miguel Nicolelis, a top neuroscientist at Duke
University, says computers will never replicate the human brain and that the
technological Singularity is “a bunch of hot air.”
“The brain is not computable and no engineering
can reproduce it,” says Nicolelis, author of several pioneering papers on
brain-machine interfaces.
The Singularity, of course, is that moment when
a computer super-intelligence emerges and changes the world in ways beyond our
comprehension.
Among the idea’s promoters are futurist Ray
Kurzweil, recently hired on at Google as a director of engineering, who has
been predicting that not only will machine intelligence exceed our own, but
people will be able to download their thoughts and memories into computers (see
“Ray Kurzweil Plans to Create a Mind at Google—and Have It Serve You”).
Nicolelis calls that idea sheer bunk.
“Downloads will never happen,” he said during remarks made at the annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on
Sunday. “There are a lot of people selling the idea that you can mimic the
brain with a computer.”
The debate over whether the brain is a kind of
computer has been running for decades. Many scientists think it’s possible, in
theory, for a computer to equal the brain given sufficient computer power and
an understanding of how the brain works.
Kurzweil delves into the idea of
“reverse-engineering” the brain in his latest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret
of Human Thought Revealed, in which he says even though the brain may be
immensely complex, “the fact that it contains many billions of cells and
trillions of connections does not necessarily make its primary method complex.”
But Nicolelis is in a camp that thinks that
human consciousness (and if you believe in it, the soul) simply can’t be
replicated in silicon. That’s because its most important features are the
result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells,
Nicolelis says.
“You can’t predict whether the stock market
will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he says. “You could have all
the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.”
The neuroscientist, originally from Brazil,
instead thinks that humans will increasingly subsume machines (an idea,
incidentally, that’s also part of Kurzweil’s predictions).
In a study published last week, for instance,
Nicolelis’s group at Duke used brain implants to allow mice to sense infrared
light, something mammals can’t normally perceive. They did it by wiring a
head-mounted infrared sensor to electrodes implanted into a part of the brain
called the somatosensory cortex.
The experiment, in which several mice were able
to follow sensory cues from the infrared detector to obtain a reward, was the
first ever to use a neural implant to add a new sense to an animal, Nicolelis
says.
That’s important because the human brain has
evolved to take the external world—our surroundings and the tools we use—and
create representations of them in our neural pathways. As a result, a talented
basketball player perceives the ball “as just an extension of himself” says
Nicolelis.
Similarly, Nicolelis thinks in the future
humans with brain implants might be able to sense x-rays, operate distant
machines, or navigate in virtual space with their thoughts, since the brain
will accommodate foreign objects including computers as part of itself.
Recently, Nicolelis’s Duke lab has been looking
to put an exclamation point on these ideas. In one recent experiment, they used
a brain implant so that a monkey could control a full-body computer avatar,
explore a virtual world, and even physically sense it.
In other words, the human brain creates models
of tools and machines all the time, and brain implants will just extend that
capability. Nicolelis jokes that if he ever opened a retail store for brain
implants, he’d call it Machines “R” Us.
But if he’s right, us ain’t machines, and never
will be.
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Antonio Regalado Senior Editor, Business
I am the business editor of MIT Technology
Review. I look for stories about how technology is changing business. Before
joining MIT Technology Review in July 2011, I lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where
I wrote about science, technology, and politics in Latin America for Science...
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