Virtual Mice Brains

Just as a series of articles(2) in various papers concerning the (un)likelihood of AI robots had left me feeling sorry that I might never live to have my skull split open and an exact replica of my mind and CNS instantiated on a supercomputer some wonderful news from researchers at IBM has shown that there is hope on the horizon.

The researchers have created a "simulation of a cortical network with the size, link complexity and signal activity of a mouse brain, but without the structure". So we know now that there is certainly no theoretical reason why a mouse brain couldn't by instantiated within a synthetic computer.

The next obvious step, presumably, is to find some way of scanning the brain of a mouse or similar creature so that we can create a virtual mouse brain. Here's a pdf write-up of the experiment.

According to the article at Open the Future by comparing the complexity of a human brain to that of a mouse we see that if Moore's Law continues we will be looking at hardware capable of running human minds within 20 years or so.