“Dust you and to dust you will return,” God says in the Bible to Adam, and although the truth of these words is obvious to everyone, mankind does not abandon its attempts to come up with a more reliable and durable basis for a person than a collection of living cells.
The fruit fly's brain is 300 microns thick. This tiny biological apparatus contains several hundred thousand neurons, which cannot be compared with the 100 billion neurons contained in the brain of Homo sapiens. Nevertheless, Drosophila and its relatives in the fly tribe are not at all primitive creatures. Try to catch a fly, and it will most likely slip away - such a reaction will be the envy of any athlete. These insects can fly, see in ultraviolet rays and are perfectly oriented in space without any GPS. The fly's brain - an insignificant drop of living matter - works like a perfect electronic computer and is much more complex.
Disassemble for details
Man, of course, is a much more advanced being. His intellect has created many amazing things, such as an electron microscope that takes pictures with a resolution of 10 billion pixels, or a device that can cut the brain of a Drosophila into thinner films 50 nm thick. Layer by layer, a microscope photographs the fly's brain. Then the software analyzes the images, recognizing the neuron body, axons, dendrites, synapses. The goal of such studies, which were carried out, for example, in the famous neurobiological laboratory Janelia Farm, located in Virginia (USA), is to create a 3D diagram of all the connections existing in the insect's brain.
Humanity sees robots not only as their skillful helpers. Some believe that advances in computing and advances in neuroscience will gradually bring androids closer to Homo sapiens. Perhaps one day people will be able to transfer their “I” together with all their experience and knowledge into the electronic brain of the machine, and in this capacity they will acquire immortality. While this is a fantasy, but science is already taking the first steps towards this dream.
Brain mapping of living beings is one of the most interesting areas of modern neuroscience. After all, in order to fix something, it would be nice to have a diagram of this device and understand how it works. Moreover, it is obvious that although the brain of the same Drosophila is orders of magnitude simpler than the human brain, the basic principles on which they work are identical, and it is much easier to go from simple to complex. The closer we come to understanding the structure of the brain, the sooner medicine will learn to help those suffering from severe and now incurable diseases associated with lesions of gray matter. But it's not only that.
The rapprochement between a robot and a human goes in several directions. The first - it is an attempt to create mathematical models of the processes taking place inside the brain in order to emulate these processes on a computer. The second direction - “Humanizing” the machine interface, attempts to make a robot or virtual avatar communicate with a person using expressive language and rich facial expressions. Third - creation of virtual characters that absorb the life experience of real people.
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Chip mimics synapse
It is customary to compare the brain with a computer, but it has long been known that this similarity is only very superficial: under our cranium there are processes that are fundamentally different from digital calculations based on binary logic. On the other hand, the brain is a natural object that works according to the laws of physics. And where physics is, there is mathematics. If you correctly measure all the parameters of the brain, numerically evaluate its work in dynamics, then it is possible to create a mathematical model of gray matter and emulate it on a digital computer. Actions in this direction are already being actively taken - we recently talked about the Blue Brain project, within the framework of which a computer model of the rat neocortex is being created. Last year, it was reported that MIT laboratories have developed chips that emulate the work of synapses, that is, the places of contact between neurons. The chips mimic the actions of ion channels that transmit electrical signals from neuron to neuron in the form of sodium, calcium or potassium ions. Unlike conventional microcircuits, the transistors of which have only two states corresponding to logical "1" and "0", the new generation chips vary the signal strength in a wider range, just as it happens in the brain. Representatives of IBM reported to the public about similar achievements. All this means that work on a kind of reverse engineering of the physical structures of the brain is already underway.how it happens in the brain. Representatives of IBM reported to the public about similar achievements. All this means that work on a kind of reverse engineering of the physical structures of the brain is already underway.how it happens in the brain. Representatives of IBM reported to the public about similar achievements. All this means that work on a kind of reverse engineering of the physical structures of the brain is already underway.
The idea of "digital immortality" was first expressed in 1971. Brain neurons exchange electrochemical signals at a speed of 150 m / s. A complete 3D map of the human brain will contain 20,000 TB of information.
The lure of the singularity
To what horizon is progress in this area striving? Recently, there has been a lot of talk about technological singularity (TS), a phenomenon scientifically substantiated by the famous American expert on artificial intelligence, Raymond Kurzweil. In general philosophical terms, TS is understood as a kind of qualitative leap in scientific and technological progress, as a result of which it will become so complex that it will no longer be understandable by the ordinary human mind. However, when applied to advances in computing, when it comes to TS, it is usually meant that at some point (if Moore's law continues to apply) the performance of computers will be high enough to completely emulate the human brain. On the other hand,the work of neuroscientists will allow by the same moment to fully understand the structure of the brain and prepare everything necessary for … downloading consciousness to a computer. Mind Uploading is sometimes referred to as creating a non-biological substrate for the human mind. And in the world there are many people, including those related to science, who believe in the possibility of transferring a person from a biological basis to a more reliable and ageless one - to computer hardware.
The prospects are fantastically attractive. For example, the “I” copied to the hard disk (or what will they come up with in the future?) Works at work and does not get tired at all - it's a computer! And the real "I" is resting, philosophizing, reflecting on interesting questions. Or another idea - to give human intelligence, which in many special computing tasks is still inferior to a computer in terms of speed, superhuman computing capabilities. We think deeply, like a person, and think fast, like a supercomputer - this is something you can only dream of! And finally, the main thing is that the transfer of consciousness from the head to the server actually gives the person immortality, if we assume that this server will always be in working order. Or maybe it will not be a server, but a robot that will retain the feelings of the "I" of that personwhose consciousness is copied into the electronic brain of the android. There is an alternative option: with the help of nanorobots, gradually and painlessly for a person, replace the biological elements of mental machinery in his head with almost eternal nanochips that will accurately simulate the work of their short-lived counterparts.
The robot Actroid-DER2 of the Japanese company Kokoro Dreams is clearly made to overcome the "sinister valley" syndrome - feeling of dislike in front of a realistic android. Actroid-DER2 exudes youth, beauty and sexuality. The girl has rich facial expressions and realistic gestures: she is a born hostess and a fashion model.
Brain with soccer field
Is silicon immortality real? For all the attractiveness of this concept, there are many scientists who are skeptical about its realism. One of the obstacles is associated with the enormous material and energy consumption of the currently existing digital analogs of brain regions. The human brain weighs as much as a normal laptop with a power consumption of 20 watts. The Blue Brain project includes an array of supercomputers sitting in a huge hall and devouring colossal amounts of energy. By today's calculations, a complete computer emulation of the human brain would require at least a soccer field filled with supercomputers. Singularity enthusiasts argue in response: we have already seen in our lifetime how the computing power of multistory mainframes suddenly found itself at the disposal of portable devices. So in the future - perhapsthanks to the development of quantum computers, today's soccer fields with servers will shrink to pocket-size. And maybe these people are right, but there are obstacles of a more fundamental nature on the way to the singularity.
Doctor's second life
Co-sponsored by the University of Central Florida and the University of Illinois at Chicago, Lifelike is one of the most exciting attempts at virtual life extension. Its hero is Dr. Alex Schwarzkopf, a respected scientist, employee of the US National Science Foundation, now on a well-deserved retirement.
During the implementation of the project, a virtual double of the doctor is created, which will preserve for young generations not only the scientific and intellectual experience of Schwarzkopf, but also his appearance, facial expressions, voice, manner of communication. The task is distributed between the laboratories of two universities.
Researchers in Chicago are looking at the "look" of a computer doctor. With the help of Vicon, a motion capture program, they transfer the manner of movement to the virtual counterpart from its prototype. FaceGen is used to reproduce correct facial expressions.
A group of scientists from Florida is responsible for the intelligence of the "virtual" and his ability to communicate, including with several interlocutors. For this, in particular, the AskAlex system has been created, which makes it possible for any person to talk with the twin of Dr. Schwarzkopf appearing on the display about the scientific problems that the real doctor has devoted his life to solving.
The brain is alive, and therefore it is constantly changing and developing, reacting to this or that information that the senses provide it. Moreover, the reaction to the same information each time will differ from the previous one. It is very difficult to "catch" such a system in statics, to fix its unambiguous state. In addition, before transferring consciousness from the brain of a living person to the computer that controls the robot, it is necessary to first figure out two things: first, what is consciousness, and secondly, how does the brain encode information within itself. So far, scientific ideas about this boil down to a set of hypotheses. In particular, consciousness is described as a combination of attention and short-term memory, but this is too little to understand whether the robot is able to sense its "I". Attempts to decipher the nerve code, the same "software" that the brain uses,bring certain results: in particular, it has been established that not only electrical signals are involved in coding, but also different values of their level, as well as the time intervals between them. However, until the moment when scientists can unambiguously describe our entire rich sensual and intellectual life in the language of a nerve code, and then transfer this code into a binary digital, it is so far that it is even impossible to say for sure whether this moment will ever come.that it is even impossible to say for sure whether this moment will ever come.that it is even impossible to say for sure whether this moment will ever come.
Consolation avatar
But even if the ideal of silicon immortality is technically unattainable for the present-day generations, there are more realistic options for extending the existence of one's “I” in time using modern information technologies. Let's say that most of us know nothing about our ancestors who lived a hundred years ago, unless they were famous people of their time. The memory of the life of an ordinary person does not last long. However, now there are projects on the network that invite ordinary people to create something like an electronic archive of their lives. Services such as, for example, Lifenaut, invite users to create their own computer avatar and fill it with “knowledge base” with any information related to a person. This is not only photos, videos, diaries, travel maps, but also data on habits, manners, preferences. Someone in such projects will be able to see another trick with the aim of extracting personal data for advertisers, but their participants certainly hope that someday in the distant future, their great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to communicate almost live with the computer double of their ancestor. And it will also be something like immortality.
Oleg Makarov