[lit-ideas] Has the military gone crazy? First they create al Qaeda, now... battle cats?
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:53:56 -0700
DARPA, the Pentagon's research arm, is quietly creeping toward its goal of
creating an artificial
brain<http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/08/darpa-fake-brai.html>.
DARPA's talks with HRL Laboratories, a joint venture of Boeing and General
Motors, apparently are *almost* complete, and barring a sudden shift, it
looks like HRL will spearhead the effort to build a chip with the "function,
size, and power consumption" of a cat's cortex within the next 10 years.
The goal is to build a chip with "neuroscience-inspired architecture that
can address a wide range of cognitive abilities — perception, planning,
decision making, and motor control." "The first nine-month phase of the
program will focus on designing, fabricating, and characterizing synaptic
and neural elements and combining them into a high-density, interconnecting
microelectronic 'fabric,' which will be incorporated into a more complex
system-level fabric design," according to the release. "In the following
15-month phase, HRL will combine the synaptic and neural elements to
fabricate and demonstrate 'cortical microcircuits' that can model various
lower-level brain functions and actually 'learn' by interacting with the
environment." Beyond that? "The follow-on phases of the project will create
a technology that functions like the brain of a cat, which comprises
108neurons and 10
12 synapses," said Dr. Narayan Srinivasa, SyNAPSE program manager, said.
"The human brain has roughly 1011 neurons and 1015 synapses."
-----
The last time the military had a bright idea, they created the Islamic
jihad. This time, they're creating the ultimate killing machine. Cats are
the most efficient, i.e., the most deadly predators ever produced by
evolution.
The military is really trying to do this. Amazing. Others thought the
singularity would happen in 20-30 years; the military is trying to do this
within ten years.
--
yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com
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