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Charlene Cobleigh Soreff's avatar

"I’m happy to accept neuroscientist expertise, but mainly on in how hard it is to scan brain cells and model them on computers."

I'm skeptical about the "scan" part, not the "model" part.

Eventually, I expect that modeling brain cells will be possible towhatever degree of accuracy we need. We already usesimulated neural nets for economically viable applications.

To my mind, the question is whether it will be cheaper totrain neural nets or to scan an existing person's brain in orderto acquire economically useful expertise. I think training will becheaper. We already do it and find it useful, while scanningrequires developing a whole new technology with very fine-grainedresolution. In principle, we could develop a scanning technology.In practice, I think it will lose the race with training neural nets(and other AI techniques providing similar capabilities)

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Daniel Levitin's avatar

I agree with Dr. Hanson that it's a matter of when, not if, and I think that most neuroscientists would agree, too. As pointed out, we already have done something like this for the human auditory system with cochlear implants. For space, a number of things I originally wrote in my review got edited out. Regarding the timing of the age of em, I wrote "I'm only quibbling about the time scale not the substance of the prediction."

I also mentioned a practical, personal reason for wanting the age to come in my lifetime. "I've been struggling with a certain guitarpassage. I've seen other people play it, I've watched instructional videos. could know what it feels like for Stephen Stills toplay it, I could jump start my fingers and brain to actually do it."

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