Samsung is planning to reverse-engineer the human brain on to a chip
- Reference: 1632755769
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/09/27/samsung_planning_a_silicon_brain/
- Source link:
The Korean megacorp has linked with Harvard University to replicate the make-up of the brain in a chip format in the hope that doing so will allow future chips to access the brain's "low power, facile learning, adaptation to environment, and even autonomy and cognition" capabilities.
According to [1]Samsung : "The brain is made up of a large number of neurons, and their wiring map is responsible for the brain's functions. Thus the knowledge of the map is the key to reverse engineering the brain."
[2]
The four names listed for the super-heavyweight Samsung-Harvard team include Harvard professors Donhee Ham and Hongkun Park; Samsung SDS president and CEO Sungwoo Hwang; and VC and CEO of Samsung Electronics, Kinam Kim.
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Their "perspective paper" – "Neuromorphic electronics based on copying and pasting the brain", [5]published in Nature Electronics – suggests that by copying the brain's complex mechanics and transposing them on to Samsung's memory tech, the electronics may be able to mimic some of the brain's qualities.
"The essence of this vision is to 'copy' the functional synaptic connectivity map of a mammalian neuronal network using advanced neuroscience tools and then 'paste' this map onto a high-density three-dimensional network of solid-state memories. Our copy-and-paste approach could potentially lead to silicon integrated circuits that better approximate computing traits of the brain," the paper stated.
[6]South Korea surfs silicon shortage to record tech exports
[7]Speciality electronics outfit boasts of 64-fold density increase for its latest space-ready MRAM parts
[8]Epic Games asks for Apple's help to put South Korea's alternative app payments law to work
[9]Samsung offered tax rebates for 30 years to build $17bn chip plant in Texas
The team plans to do this by using "a breakthrough nanoelectrode array developed by Dr Ham and Dr Park, and to paste this map onto a high-density three-dimensional network of solid-state memories."
This is a fairly big ask, as in Samsung's own words: "Since the human brain has an estimated 100 billion or so neurons, and a thousand or so times more synaptic connections, the ultimate neuromorphic chip will require 100 trillion or so memories."
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This is a "perspective paper" and so is somewhat speculative in its ideas, and Samsung has not revealed how long they think it might take to create such a computing behemoth (or how big it would be). But while these are clearly enormous numbers, in terms of simple maths they are actually not beyond the technology we have at present.
One hundred trillion bytes is equal to 100 terabytes, and while it might be difficult for any human replication of neural pathways to be quite as elegant in its execution as what natural evolution has managed to come up with, Samsung is clearly in a position to furnish such a project with as much high-spec memory as it needs.
So it may be that the only thing preventing us from replicating the human brain, and perhaps actually creating [11]Isaac Asimov's Multivac supercomputer without it being half a mile long and three stories high, is whether Dr Ham and Dr Park's "nanoelectrode array" is up to the task.
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No pressure eh, lads? ®
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[1] https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-puts-forward-a-vision-to-copy-and-paste-the-brain-on-neuromorphic-chips
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YVHqxy@6JdVNWur3xNDBTQAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YVHqxy@6JdVNWur3xNDBTQAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YVHqxy@6JdVNWur3xNDBTQAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-021-00646-1
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/17/south_korea_record_tech_exports/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/15/micross_mram/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/10/epic_vs_apple_south_korea/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/07/samsung_intel_chip_fab/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YVHqxy@6JdVNWur3xNDBTQAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/lessons-from-the-multivac/523773/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YVHqxy@6JdVNWur3xNDBTQAAAAo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Strongly disagree that non-human brains aren't intelligent or aware.
Let's hope
Let's hope that it's not going to be anyone from the UK Government
Fast forward some years - What began as a conflict over the transfer conciousness from flesh to machine, escalated into a war which has decimated over a million worlds, the Apple and the Samsung have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remainance of their arms battle on ravaged planets, their hatred fueled by 4000 years of stock market manipulation.
Wow, that takes me back. Guess I'll be hunting that down to play tonight.
Coincidentally the game was 24 years old yesterday!
They should start with a cat, when it completely ignores everything you try to teach it they can claim success.
Alternatively
They could carefully rear babies in a nurturing environment, send them to the best schools and universities and offer the most promising ones a job at Samsung when they're in their early 20s.
Really?
How will they do this as we don't really know how a brain works?
Loads of creatures are intelligent, some by inference of human biased tests appear to be self-aware. Many animals including crows, bees and primates have vocabulary, but so far only humans seem to have language. See Chomsky. Some have claimed parrots or chimps are communicating using language, but independent experts have not verified any language skills, only vocabulary. Language lets you construct new ideas which can be tested or simply entertain.
Also the coarse structure is one thing, but how that actually works is different. Also a computer neural network is a sort of dataflow HW & SW distributed implementation and not much like biological neurons which are only part of a brain. A fruit fly has about 100,000 neurons. A human has about 90 billion neurons. But neurons are only one part of brain structure. You might fit the structure of a fruit fly on a chip using billions of transistors. Except we don't have enough detail on even how that works to "copy and paste" it on a chip.
This is simply research and has very little to do with how a biological brain works.
"Although neurons are often described of as "fundamental units" of the brain, they perform internal computations. Neurons integrate input within dendrites, and this complexity is lost in models that assume neurons to be a fundamental unit. Dendritic branches can be modeled as spatial compartments, whose activity is related due to passive membrane properties, but may also be different depending on input from synapses. Compartmental modelling of dendrites is especially helpful for understanding the behavior of neurons that are too small to record with electrodes, as is the case for [the fruit fly]"
This is not really what they claim it is.
Copy... paste... infringement... Profit!
...Samsung is working to "copy and paste" the structure of the human brain...
But if you copy a human brain, then you are infringing copyright. Not only the copyright of the brain's creator, but also all the original brain's thoughts and produce, concrete and potential. The (owner of the) copy is guilty of instantaneous copyright infringement at an closely to infinite scale. The lawyer domain will have a field day retrieving near infinite times the maximum fine qualifying to the entire wealth of the universe. And it is true, the value of this single copy of a brain is more valuable than any universe.
A couple of problems:
If you just copy the hardware, you get a dead brain, or, if you are lucky, a 0 day-old baby.
We don't know what the difference between the brains of for example Donald Trump or Dominic Raab, and a human of normal intelligence.
Do we even know if all the important functions actually take place within the brain?
Abyss
When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
Imagine having a sandbox environment for your ideas or just having a spare brain for others to pick, while you can focus on perfecting a reverse spliff.
Well, we hope that if we mimick well enough, a miracle will occur and our hardware will actually be intelligent. We have no reason to expect this to be so, as apes and other human-similar brains aren't "intelligent" and "aware", but we're out of ideas. We're chasing the old theory that "any sufficiently complex system is implicitly intelligent."