Lecture
The United States and the European Union are boosting research on the brain: governments and major corporations are organizing megaprojects for the construction of artificial brain and "neuromorphic computers." This is a giant financial investment. In addition to the "Human Genome", there were no projects of such magnitude in biology. We decided to find out what they are hoping for and whether in the foreseeable future we will get an artificial intelligence \
The human brain is the most complex device in the known part of the universe. How does this pink lump of mucus give rise to consciousness, the mind and the whole subjective world? How can chemical reactions determine our spiritual impulses? How can the interaction of atoms go into love and hate? No more intriguing mystery.
Since Descartes, this mystery has introduced philosophers into a stupor. Philosophers were replaced by researchers - optimistic experimenters who are looking for a technical solution to any problem. The 1990s were declared the “decade of the brain” by the scientific community of the USA and Europe, but the mystery remained unsolved, although even the great Francis Crick, who decoded the DNA code, was enthusiastically fighting over it in the last years of his life. Methods for studying brain activity did not even closely correspond to the level of complexity of the brain - it is the same as studying a computer because of its buzz, turning its details in the hands.
In 2005, the journal Science, celebrating its 125th anniversary, interviewed the world's leading scientists about the main problems that science will have to solve in the next quarter of a century. The first places were taken by two questions: “What does the Universe consist of?” And “What is the biological basis of consciousness?”.
Eight more years passed, and it was time for a new attempt, much more ambitious than all previous ones. After a century of experimentation and improved methods, the brain science will begin a decisive assault on this problem.
In a February address to fellow citizens, Barack Obama said: “It’s time to reach a level of research and development unprecedented since the peak of the space race.” It turned out that state budget cuts undertaken by the US government will not affect advanced scientific developments: “Now is not the time to gut investment in science and innovation.” On the contrary, the President of the United States proposes to “invest in great ideas” and fork out for a national project similar to the “Human Genome.”
“Every dollar we invested in creating the human genome map returned 140 dollars to our economy - every dollar! And today, our scientists are creating a map of the brain. ” Obama is referring to the "Brain Activity Map" planned by leading US academic institutions. This is a ten-year research program that requires a budget of about $ 3 billion ($ 3.8 billion was spent on the Human Genome, and according to a government study, $ 800 billion was back, and this is only the beginning).
Not only Americans are willing to invest billions in the study of the brain, despite the economic crisis. The tightened belts of the EU countries have just thrown off a billion euros for the Human Brain project, whose goal is to create a working model of the human brain. It turned out that progress like air requires megaprojects like the Large Hadron Collider - without them, fundamental breakthroughs do not occur, and the development of technology goes into improving gadgets and new packaging for old ideas.
The newspapers write about the beginning of the "new space race." True, we do not participate in it this time, we have other priorities: the construction of the Olympic road Adler - Krasnaya Polyana alone is more expensive than the American and European projects combined. Well, what are they fighting for?
Last year an article by George Charch, a professor of genetics at Harvard, who once led the human genome project, was published in the highly regarded magazine Neuron. Together with five colleagues, he proposed starting the project “Brain Activity Map” (Brain Activity Map, or simply YOU). The goal is to learn to register the pulses of all neurons in the brain of an animal. “The essence of our proposal is to create technologies that will track every impulse of every neuron in the brain of a living organism. Maybe then we will understand what consciousness is or even different levels of consciousness, ”explains Charch.
The task is clearly more daring and risky than even the "Human Genome". There are almost a million times more synapses (neural connections) in the brain than the number of letters in the genome. And we will have to work not with biomaterials like blood or saliva, but with the living brain, the principles of which we understand so far very roughly.
If “genome” means the totality of all genes of an organism, then the complete map of neural connections is called “connect” (the suffix “-om” is now generally in vogue). So far, the only organism for which scientists have been able to make a connection is a nematode — a millimeter-long worm with three sexes: boys, girls, and hermaphrodites. Nematodes of traditional sexual orientation have a thousand neurons, and for some reason hermaphrodites have only 302. These 302 neurons and seven thousand connections between them were able to be mapped back in 1986 after twelve years of hard work.
Then, based on this scheme, they made a virtual nematode - they programmed a virtual environment for it and tried to force the worm model to crawl according to the environment model. But the sense of such a model turned out to be a bit: it did not work out a simple behavior of nematodes, because we do not know many details of the work of its nervous system.
It is necessary to create not just a connection, but a functional connection - a live map of the activity of the nervous system in real time. To develop the technology, the authors of the BAM project are planning on any part of the Drosophila brain, not exceeding 15,000 neurons. Five years are allotted to this, in the next five years they expect to visualize the work of all 135 thousand Drosophila brain neurons, and then move on to more complex objects consisting of a million neurons: the zebrafish nervous system and the mouse hippocampus.
If everything works out, they will take on the brains of our smaller brothers: starting from the dwarf polydenticle, the smallest and simplest mammal, and ending with primates. The final reference is the map of the working human brain.
Our brain contains about 100 billion neurons and almost ten thousand times more connections - 1 quadrillion. This is an incredibly intricate network of connections between neural ensembles, which are connected into large "orchestras" depending on the task that the brain faces. In addition, they differ from one person to another.
“There is no clear localization of functions in the brain at all,” explained Svyatoslav Medvedev, director of the Institute of the Human Brain RAS. - Rather, it has interfaces of interaction with the world, such as the mechanism of visual perception. But the highest forms of activity involved the whole brain. As a result, accurate brain mapping like mapping of the human genome is impossible. Some fields of the cerebral cortex are included in some kind of human activity more, others less, but the brain works as a whole.
There is a risk that the American BAM could turn into long-term construction. The authors of the project hope that a huge fleet of nano-machines that will penetrate the brain, sit on each neuron and record its activity will help them create a map of brain activity. All this sounds on the verge of delirium, but not for pragmatists from DARPA, Google and Microsoft, who are already meeting and discussing the project together with representatives of government agencies and private foundations. In March, the “Brain Activity Map” is going to be announced at the state level as a national project, then it is planned to start creating a network of state “brain observatories” for it.
A few weeks before Obama’s speech, the European Commission issued a “Future Technology” grant worth a billion euros to the Human Brain Project (HBP). The purpose of the plan is to create a “silicon brain”, that is, a full-fledged model of the human brain on a supercomputer.
Full - it means thinking? It seems that even the project director, Professor of the Swiss Federal Technical Institute of Lausanne Henry Markram is not sure.
- Will we create something reasonable? Consciousness of the artificial brain, we do not exclude, for surely in the work of neurons there is something more than just impulses. But this is already a philosophy, ”he said in an interview with a RR correspondent.
Since 2005, Markram has been modeling the cerebral cortex using the Blue Gene supercomputer, an advanced descendant of the chess champion Deep Blue. The scientist was able to realistically reproduce a column of 10 thousand neurons - the structural unit of the rat cortex. 8192 supercomputer processors were used to model the column - each processor was modeled on a neuron. Recently, Markram has connected a hundred columns to a neural network - a million virtual neurons. Soon, he expects to create a rat brain model that works in real time (that is, 1 second of the brain will be modeled by processors in 1 second).
The cortex of the human brain also consists of similar columns, it has 20 billion neurons, and Markram undertakes to build its virtual analog in less than a decade.
“Perhaps in ten years a report on our successes will make an artificial intelligence hologram,” Markram says to the participants of the TED conference, while the endless tangles of virtual neurons flash on the screen.
The problem here is not so much in the number of neurons, as in the quality of the simulation. Back in 2008, a model of a hundred billion neuron neural networks, but much simpler and less like real ones, was created in the laboratory of the Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman.
In order to realistically simulate the human brain, Neuropolis is built in Switzerland near Lausanne - an analogue of CERN and Silicon Valley for brain research. Neuropolis, the first laboratories of which will open this year, will become the center of the HBP megaproject, in which 120 teams of scientists from 90 institutes from 22 countries are already participating.
The space race led people to the moon, gave us cellular communications and navigators, accelerated the development of computers, gave impetus to a number of high-tech industries and the entire economy. And what will the race of artificial brains give?
“Two billion people on the planet are suffering from mental disorders, and we are still trying to find medications for them through trial and error,” says Professor Markram.
He expects that the virtual brain will allow you to understand the causes of mental illness. It will be possible to simulate the effect of drugs and other treatments. The American president says the same thing: “You will receive a detailed picture of any pathology, and we will understand the causes of Alzheimer's disease, schizophrenia, depression, autism and other brain diseases.”
The development of nanorobots that will be needed to track the activity of each neuron can be a driving force for medicine and the entire economy. Similar nanomachines will be able to repair the body at the cellular level, and later, like bacteria, will fill our world, making it reasonable and manageable.
The development of neuromorph computers that mimic the functions of the human brain threatens with even larger effects — it was not for nothing that IBM provided the Blue Gene supercomputer with IBM and sponsored several brain reconstruction projects at once.
Computers with classical architecture can do much where it comes to sorting out a large number of options (like in a game of chess), but the naive hopes that artificial intelligence can be created by simply increasing their speed have long collapsed.
Since the 1970s, the speed of computers has exceeded forecasts by millions of times, and they have not become smarter. It turned out that programs are much more important than “hardware”, but in the field of software development, stagnation and despondency have reigned for decades. Translation programs translate exactly helplessly as twenty years ago; with image recognition, we have not advanced; text editors, browsers and all programs for the average consumer have not undergone any fundamental changes.
To make computers smarter, you need to change the basic principles of their work. For example, create them on the basis of memristors. "Memristor" is one more word from the actual lexicon of science. We are talking about electronic analogs of synapses - connections between the neurons of the brain (each neuron is associated with the remaining thousands of synapses). To get an analogue of the brain, memristors must be able to form new connections (this is the essence of learning at the neural level), but we still do not know exactly how this process takes place in a real brain.
The need for neuromorphic, or, as they are also called, cognitive computers is very great and serves as one of the main engines of the “new space race”. The fact is that we are all worse coping with the exponentially growing data avalanche that is falling on us. It is increasingly difficult to extract useful information from gigantic arrays of medical records, instrument readings, and press reports. Today data science is the science of data is one of the most rapidly developing areas of knowledge, and specialists in big data, large data arrays, are the most in demand in the market.
“We need cognitive computers not to replace people,” says John Kelly, research director at IBM, “but to enable us to survive in a world of gigantic amounts of data.” If we do not learn to extract information from them, this data will bury us, we will begin to make disastrous decisions.
However, sensible neuro-robots can also replace people. If you can create an artificial analogue of the human brain, then you can do something more powerful. And then, in order not to become the pets of supercomputers, people will have to create amplifiers of their brain.
Well-known futurologist Ray Kurzweil believes that the time is approaching when we will create an artificial neocortex that will radically expand the capabilities of our intellect. You don’t have to carry it with you: the brains of people and computers will be connected by a neuronet - a network that will be the next step in the development of neural interfaces, which now allow control of external objects by the power of thought. The time of symbiosis of biological and artificial life will come. The history of people as a biological species will end, the history of posthumanity will begin - a species that will create itself.
As always, the upcoming breakthroughs in understanding the work of the brain and the creation of an artificial mind inspire optimists with hope, and pessimists fear. In addition to the uprising of machines, our contemporaries are afraid, of course, that deciphering the neural code will give the secret services and other evil forces unlimited possibilities in reading thoughts, mind control and zombies of the population. In the USA, where the government is traditionally regarded with suspicion, such fears are especially strong.
Optimists and pessimists are united by the belief that the mind and consciousness arise by themselves from the work of a neural network, like “god from a machine” (this expression in antiquity meant an unexpected resolution of a confusing situation, not following from the natural course of events).
"I am my connection," said Sebastian Seung, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the leading developers of neural connection cards, at the TED conference. A lot of data has been accumulated in favor of this hypothesis. For example, back in the 90s it was experimentally proved the existence of a “Bill Clinton neuron,” that is, a neuron that is activated when and only when we remember the ex-president, regardless of whether we read his name, see his image or remember the events associated with it. When activated, this neuron lowers the excitation threshold of a neural ensemble associated with it, encoding similar concepts: Hillary, Monica, saxophone, “I breathed in, but did not drag out,” and so on.
Apparently, in the human brain there is a neuron responsible for coding specific objects, including his grandmother (the theory, which predicted the existence of such neurons in the 1960s, was called “my grandmother’s neuron theory”).
But there is also data that is not consistent with the idea that all memories and aspects of a person’s personality are encoded in neuron connections. You can start with the fact that the brain consists not only of neurons, it has ten times more so-called glial cells.Until recently, they were considered “second-class cells” created to feed and repair neurons. But a number of studies have demonstrated that they are engaged in a lively dialogue with neurons and with each other using chemical signals that regulate the activity of neurons and the formation of new synapses. If this is true, then until recently, most of the brain was simply ignored.
And what about the neurons of the peripheral nervous system, and with all the other cells of the body? Why are nerve cells capable of generating experience, and no other cells? After all, neurons are fundamentally no different from them. Not only neural networks, but also unicellular organisms, such as amoeba or infusoria, are capable of simple forms of learning and memorizing information. What do they remember?
Perhaps the secret of the mind is inside the cell, not the outside. According to one of the hypotheses, the microtubules that make up the “skeleton” of the cell are the substrate capable of storing information and processing it inside the cell. The tubulin protein contained in these microtubules is capable of changing its state, moving into one of several stable positions, and thus recording information.
However, by modeling the “spherical brain in a vacuum”, the mind cannot be created: even for a small nematode, the brain and the brain had to simulate the body and its whole simple medium. Our mind is formed in the active interaction with the world, and is not an automatic function of the complex brain.
These are skeptics who, like the famous mathematician Roger Penrose, believe that consciousness and mind cannot miraculously arise from the exchange of signals in a network, however complex this network may be.
“People think that consciousness comes from some complex aspect of computational activity,” explains Penrose. - I look at this problem completely differently. In my opinion, a lot of computational activity occurs in the brain, but it is unconscious. And consciousness, in my opinion, is something fundamentally different. Understanding is not a calculation. Something else is happening. I believe in science and believe that everything that happens in our head obeys the same laws that the Universe around us obeys. But these laws are not fully understood by us. I try to find this gap in our knowledge, this is “something else”.
It is difficult to model the mind if we do not know what it is. But if you do not engage in scientific storming of brain puzzles, you will never know.
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Artificial Intelligence. Basics and history. Goals.
Terms: Artificial Intelligence. Basics and history. Goals.