Dr. Matthias Heger wrote:
http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf
- Matthias
When I have criticized Whole Brain Emulation in the past, I have always
said that it suffers from two critical problems:
1) The technology required to actually capture the data,
2) The problem of "blind" debugging a system that is more complicated
than any we have ever built and which (by assumption) we do not
functionally understand.
On the latter question, this report is - to my utter astonishment -
almost completely silent.
Never before in scientific or engineering history has anyone proposed to
build a system of fabulous complexity by simply copying it from an
existing system, without understanding how the original works in at
least a reasonably comprehensive way. In this case, they propose to do
just that.
When the system is built, there will inevitably be bugs: chunks of data
that are corrupted along the way. But if those bugs cause the final
system to misbehave, there will be no way to track them down, because
there will effectively be no way to test functional subsystems. The
debugging will be almost "blind".
It would be comparable to you trying to implement the software required
to run the entire air traffic control system of the United States by
copying down the code that is read out to you over a noisy telephone
line by someone who does not understand the code they are reading to
you. At the end of the day, if you end up with some problems in the
code because you transcribed it wrong, how would you even begin to debug
it? And if you heard that someone was thinking of doing such a project,
would you not expect them to have a comprehensive plan for dealing with
this problem, before they rush in and ask for billions of dollars to
start collecting data?
This report - which is supposed to be a comprehensive look at the
feasibility of WBE - makes almost no mention of this difficulty except
toward the end, where it includes a passing reference to the fact that
new types of debugging techniques will be required.
Given that this is one of the most serious objections to the WBE idea, I
would have expected at least half of the document to deal with the issue.
The fact that they have not done this confirms my suspicion that work on
WBE is, at this point in time, a wild goose chase. Good for keeping
neuroscientists employed, but of little value otherwise.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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