Professor Henry Markram has announced that his team will develop the world’s first artificial conscious and intelligent mind within a decade through his Blue Brain project. The effort seeks to construct a computerized copy of a human brain within one of the most powerful computers in the world. It is hoped that this mind will achieve self-awareness and become capable of thinking, reasoning, expressing will, and possibly emotional experience. The hub of Markram’s experiment is his lab at the Ecole Polytechnique’s Brain Mind Institute, and project investors include the Swiss government, IBM, and the European Union. Rather than trying to mimic what a brain does, Markram’s strategy is to model the brain’s biology from the bottom up by dissecting the mind at the cellular level, analyzing the billions of links between brain cells, and then mapping out these connections into a supercomputer. Markram is convinced that consciousness is a process that emerges once a sufficient level of organized complexity is reached, and the hope is that a digital model of an actual brain will begin to exhibit brain-like behavior. Markram is currently building a software model of a rat’s neocortical column in IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer, and the professor speculates that a vastly more efficient, custom-built machine is needed to successfully model a human brain–a milestone that should be achieved before the end of the current decade thanks to exponentially increasing computer power. Markram has decided to keep some of the Blue Brain project’s computer coding secret in order to prevent intelligent machines from being used for malevolent purposes, such as creating futuristic weapons.
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