[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Isochroma', 'I')n a press release to the general population - or even a scientistic audience - such a title is plain false on its face, without qualification. Simple as that.

Another sad example of both the blatant corporatistic lies trumpeted in the business-owned press and designed to mislead for commerical profit - characteristic of our current age - and the more subtle but damaging mischaracterization - nay - confusion - of abstraction with reality, which is not so much unique to an age as to particular 'civilizations'.

[Isochroma]

carlhole,

You are yourself lost in abstractions. You claim my statement is nonsense, yet you yourself haven't the sense to actually make a claim as to why it is nonsense.

Instead you go off on some intellectual jackoff about progress, etc.

The title of the paper is a lie, a blatant and self-serving one too. To remind you, seeing as your memory is so short, the title was:

"IBM Has Achieved Cat Scale Brain Simulation Which are 15 times the scale of Previous Rat Brain Simulations."

Let's take this statement apart, starting at the beginning.

"Cat Scale Brain Simulation". Lie. A cat-scale brain simulation would, as its title says, be a simulation that achieves the geometric scale of a cat, in the brain area obviously.

And it would actually simulate a fucking cat brain, wouldn't it?

But IBM is not simulating a cat brain, it is running a software called NEURON which is an imitation of a vanishingly small subset of observable characteristics that are said to resemble neuron function.

An imitation of an abstraction of a limited observation.

Any good lie has elements of truth, but is nevertheless fundamentally deficient in itself.

The defining characteristic that differentiates a lie from the truth is that a lie is not just deficient in truthfulness, but that it opposes the truth, obscures the truth, misleads from the truth, imprisons and deposes of the truth.

Another characteristic of a lie is that like a weakling crop it is often propped up by supporting statements which occur near its vicinity, which obscure and legitimize the lie:

"15 times the scale of Previous Rat Brain Simulations"

The second part of the announcement is obviously true, but it says nothing qualitative about the qualitative or quantitative truth of the first statement.

Instead it occupies paper space, linguistic space, and ultimately the mental space of the sheeple who unquestioningly read it. It trumps one or more characteristics in common with the lie which indirectly support the lie without being contestable in themselves.

[flapjax]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Isochroma', '
')... but it says nothing qualitative about the qualitative or quantitative truth of the first statement.

[Isochroma]

Yes, you did.

But maybe my point was too obscure. By that statement I meant that while the second claim (15 times...) is likely true, it is used in a way which purports to support or otherwise prop up the first claim, which is false.

Language is a subtle tool, and statements aren't just thrown together by those making them at random, but in an ordered way so as to support the creation of a certain picture in the reader's mind. That process has a name too - it's called propaganda. From the blatant to the subtle, brainwashing has its forms and follows certain functions.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Isochroma', 'c')arlhole,

The title of the paper is a lie, a blatant and self-serving one too.

[Isochroma]

Let me take amoment to correct your statement: "The Blue Brain project is funded by the SWISS PEOPLE". Tax money stolen from their pockets and handed to the mega-corporation IBM.

Your resort to personal insults - 'some unknown jackass on a public discussion board' - belies your lack of ability to counter my statements, and says a lot about your own credibility.

For the record, I am opposed to taxpayer dollars being handed to big rich corporations like IBM for this kind of 'research' which is just a thinly veiled giveaway of taxpayer dollars to a giant multinational corporation.

Let's move on to a statement by IBM itself - not the title some ambitious blogger created to pump up the story:

"...that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex"
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/press ... ss#release

Another lie. Nothing they have done even meets the scale of a cat cortex, never mind exceeds it. They cannot even simulate a single cell, never mind an entire cortex. But such facts are lost in an ocean of techno-drivel propounded by IBM's loquacious PR writer - a certain Sara Delekta Galligan - who waxes poetic about how "This scientific tool, akin to a linear accelerator or an electron microscope, is a critical instrument used to test hypotheses of brain structure, dynamics and function."

Of course, the software in question and the computer it runs on are nothing at all like a linear accelerator or a microscope, in neither their design nor function or even goals.

Furthermore, IBM's tentacles are feeding from the US military-industrial complex too: "After the successful completion of Phase 0, IBM and its university partners were recently awarded $16.1M in additional funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 1 of DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) initiative."

The US military wants something that produces similar outputs to real brains without all the messy work of actually simulating the real atoms that make up a real brain.

The reason they want it is so they can run their Predators and whatever other control systems without people or with less people, and faster too: "it’s imperative that we create a more intelligent computing system that can help us make sense the vast amount of information that's increasingly available to us, much the way our brains can quickly interpret and act on complex tasks"

Such help will also find a loving home in the corporate world, where superfast stock trading algorithms will benefit, along with all the other things big corporations do or want to do superfast: firing employees, shifting trillions of dollars around the world between currencies and stocks, etc. A match made in heaven, if I may say so myself.

So the goal is to take the general public's money - from taxpayers in several countries - and use it to enrich IBM so that IBM can find a way to replace those useless stock-traders and warplane-drivers and numerous others with machines. In even simpler terms: force the general public to pay for their own obsolescence and the brains that will power their future oppressor-machines. If some brain-damaged person is someday helped by such an advance - unlikely as the possibility is since it isn't trumpeted in the press release - it will be a secondary effect.

[Isochroma]

Now it's time to flesh out the details a bit more.

It's already obvious that the case we speak of is a leech of taxpayer dollars, and that it is also another pound of pork out of the government trough.

Beyond these things, why is the US military so interested in simulating a cat brain?

For starters, it's easy. Cat brains are well-studied. Cats are easy to breed too. Their brains are small enough to be mimic-able, but large enough to be useful.

When I say useful, I mean it in a certain sense. A very particular sense, indeed.

Cats are one of the world's most efficient, most lethal predators. Their perception and classification of targets is fast, accurate - and therefore supremely desireable.

They are intelligent enough to be trained, or have instincts hardwired into their brains. And they are cruel, in a way which nicely mimics the cruelty of the very institution which is funding a mimic of their brains.

Now for the next part of the puzzle.

The USMIL is very busy developing Predators and Reapers and who knows what else. Coming online now and in the near future are observing vehicles and killer-observers with very high-resolution cameras that capture frames very fast.

Wired: Special Forces’ Gigapixel Flying Spy Sees All
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/02 ... xel-flyin/

"You may think your new ten-megapixel camera is pretty hot –- but not when you compare it to the 1.8 Gigapixel beast built for the Pentagon. The camera is designed as a payload for the A-160T Hummingbird robot helicopter now being quietly delivered to Special Forces. It will give them an unprecedented ability to track everything on the ground in real time. The camera is scheduled for flight testing at the start of next year."



Problem is, all the data is too much too fast to transmit, and having multiple people try to figure it out in realtime just won't do:

"The camera is pretty impressive, but it’s the processing and the software behind it that will make this such a capable system. It would take a human a very long time to scan the whole area under surveillance if they were looking for something – but this is exactly the type of task which the swarming software we looked at last week excels at. Luckily enough, that just happens to be a Darpa program too."

The 'swarming software' is a first attempt to get the data-river dealt with, but it isn't the kind of intelligence they really want. It doesn't have the selfsense, the vicious killer smarts of a cat. And it won't have a chance at making smart decisions when the dataflow quaduples yet again: the USMIL wants "a 2.3 gigapixel camera for aerial surveillance":

US Army wants 2.3 gigapixel camera for aerial surveillance
http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/20/us-a ... veillance/

The data is too voluminous and too fast to be transmitted in its entirety, so they need an onboard AI with sufficient intelligence to not only send selected streams out, but to eventually make decisions and predate. A cat is the ultimate predator, just smart enough and plenty fast enough to kill the chosen targets.

Cats are both supreme watchers and also vicious killers. They are the current ideal to approach for watcher-hunter-killer AI, and the IBM neuron program is the approach path.

[Isochroma]

Far, far more than just pattern recognition. They want the full spectrum: observe, hunt and kill. So they looked at what was most known in bioresearch - and likeliest to be simulable with current or near-future hardware - and settled on a logical choice: the cat - nature's ultimate hunter-killer.

"A skilled predator, the cat is known to hunt over 1,000 species for food."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat

Translation: its neural systems can be formed to recognize a large number of distinct target-types.

Cats use two hunting strategies, either stalking prey actively, or waiting in ambush until an animal comes close enough to be captured
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#Hunting_and_feeding

Translation: catlike AI will be capable of surveillance, stalking, hunting and killing.

For those who like their data compressed,

US taxpayers are funding IBM so IBM can make a software/hardware that simulates what they consider the important functions of a cat brain, so that they can develop artificial inteligences which embody the characteristics that make a cat the excellent watcher-hunter-predator it is in real life.

These AIs can then be loaded into UAVs and other military vehicles for use surveilling, hunting and killing people, buildings and other targets.

They will be fast enough to gobble down the terabits of data from gigapixel cameras in realtime, smart enough to recognize and discriminate targets from non-targets, smart enough to take higher-level orders as 'instincts' or 'urges', yet simple enough to be simulable on available hardware.

The secondary benefit to this is that as more intelligence functions are offloaded from people to simulated brains, the higher-ups will have new excuses when innocents are slaughtered or mistaken facilities are destroyed: "the AI malfunctioned".

Later on, after the USMIL's finished milking it for the initial ROIs, the taxpayer-funded research might yield catlike intelligences which predate stocks and bonds and pounce on currency trades, etc. It may seem strange but once the basis is in place, such an intelligence can be transformed to serve a variety of interests for those who control things in both the military and wealth arenas.

Lastly, one more aspect of cats bears particular relevance: the cat eye. The cat's eye and visual processing system is one of the most studied and quite adapted to its natural uses. That is one of the main attractors for those looking to implement a digital 'killer app' from a cat brain simulator in UAV or other highly visual applications.

[bratticus]

http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapit ... computers/

[copious.abundance]

Will this explain why my cat is so fascinated by water dripping from my kitchen faucet?

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Isochroma', '.')..The data is too voluminous and too fast to be transmitted in its entirety, so they need an onboard AI with sufficient intelligence to not only send selected streams out, but to eventually make decisions and predate. A cat is the ultimate predator, just smart enough and plenty fast enough to kill the chosen targets.

Cats are both supreme watchers and also vicious killers. They are the current ideal to approach for watcher-hunter-killer AI, and the IBM neuron program is the approach path.

[Carlhole]

And this one:

The Singularity Is Coming—Now What?

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')BM’s Blue Gene brain simulation has made gains in one of the most sophisticated tasks man has ever taken on—creating artificial intelligence (AI). With the true AI milestone comes the dawn of the singularity, when computers overtake humans. Contributing editor Glenn Reynolds looks into the future and wonders; what happens after the singularity?

[Arthur75]

Do you at least realize, Carlhole, that all your "scientists" statements are just promises for the future ?
(the title, indeed, being plainly false, no cat brain associated true functions at all)

The thing about these stories, is that it is a dialog a bit like the "proof of god or not" thing, in the sense :
People who think that true AI or artificial brains will never happen, or at least are very doubtful about it, cannot prove anything : brains are matter, humans can set up matter in different ways, etc

However we could at least expect minimal honesty from these "scientists", and especially making clear differences between results publication and promises statements.

Note : personnaly I am an atheist (or I don't understand or ask myself the question), but all this computer science belief, in fact is very much related to Niezsche saying something like "I think we might not be able to get rid of god, because we still believe in syntax (or grammar)" (we also could add "If weaks would start thinking about the alphabet first letter, they could quickly rush into madness" Rimbaud)

Also impressive that this "belief in syntax" (or envelop model) is now proven false (or non operational) in Mathematics since Gödel.

To summarize : These declarations are crap, and are indeed avatars of these scientists wrongly placed religious sides, or cries, they didn't dance enough.

(besides the inherent vulgarity and silliness of the associated ultra utilitarianism)

Moreover, what is happening now with technology is much more impressive and beautiful than all this: We are now sitting on a huge book, this book being permanently dead, but in constant evolution through humans writing and updating it, directly or not.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Arthur75', 'D')o you at least realize, Carlhole, that all your "scientists" statements are just promises for the future ?
(the title, indeed, being plainly false, no cat brain associated true functions at all)

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carlhole', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Arthur75', 'D')o you at least realize, Carlhole, that all your "scientists" statements are just promises for the future ?
(the title, indeed, being plainly false, no cat brain associated true functions at all)

[Carlhole]

San Jose Mercury News

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]IBM announces advances toward a computer that works like a human brain

Researchers from IBM and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say they have performed a computer simulation that matches the scale and complexity of a cat's brain, and project members from IBM and Stanford have developed an algorithm for mapping the human brain at new levels of detail. Eventually, scientists hope that detailed knowledge will help them build a computer that replicates the more complex working of a human brain.

The developments are early milestones on a long road that could one day yield applications for business, science or even the military. Still, veteran computing analyst Rick Doherty at the Envisioneering Group called the scale and significance of their progress "jaw-dropping."
The simulation, for example, did not exactly mimic what a real cat does in catching a mouse. But it surpassed earlier efforts that simulated the much simpler brain structure of a creature the size of a mouse.

Researchers used an IBM supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore Lab to model the movement of data through a structure with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses, which allowed them to see how information "percolates" through a system that's comparable to a feline cerebral cortex.

The work is part of a federally funded effort to study what's known as cognitive computing, starting with what IBM project manager Dharmendra Modha calls "reverse-engineering the human brain," or designing a new computer by first getting a better understanding of how the brain works.
"The brain is amazing," said Modha, a computer scientist who can wax poetic about the capabilities of human gray matter. "The brain has awe-inspiring capabilities. It can react or interact with complex, real-world environments, in a context-dependent way. And yet it consumes less power than a light bulb and it occupies less space than a two-liter bottle of soda."

[Isochroma]

The USMIL don't pay $16.1 for nothing. It will be used in war, as all well-funded AI is destined to be used.

And when I say war, I mean it will be used against the People by those in power.

[flapjax]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Isochroma', 'T')he USMIL don't pay $16.1 for nothing. It will be used in war, as all well-funded AI is destined to be used.

And when I say war, I mean it will be used against the People by those in power.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('flapjax', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Isochroma', 'T')he USMIL don't pay $16.1 for nothing. It will be used in war, as all well-funded AI is destined to be used.

And when I say war, I mean it will be used against the People by those in power.

[2cher]

Carhole, you can't argue science with Luddite's, it is like trying to follow an arguement between an atheist, and a theist... pointless