An interesting article on a major breakthrough in software architectures for emulating brains. More evidence that the emulation technology at the heart of Newton’s Ark is on the way and increasingly plausible in the story’s timeframe.
Category Archives: Brains
Computerized minds
For anyone interested in the scientific basis of the concept of computers that emulate human minds that is so central to the story in Newton’s Ark, this article might be interesting.
The lede is that a computer has simulated 1% of the human mind. But for me the takeaway is the following quote (emphasis mine):
“If peta-scale computers like the K computer are capable of representing 1% of the network of a human brain today, then we know that simulating the whole brain at the level of the individual nerve cell and its synapses will be possible with exa-scale computers hopefully available within the next decade.”
In the Newton’s Ark timeline, Emulated Minds first appear somewhere in the mid-2020s.
Plant our Brains in Robots
If you find the ideas in this article from Wired Magazine titled Russian Mogul’s Plan: Plant our Brains in Robots interesting, then you should read my book Newton’s Ark (and the forthcoming sequels).
I’m attempting to explore similar concepts through fiction, with the goal of trying to understand how these sorts of technological developments might affect the human experience. My view is that when confronted with ideas this radical, stories are the best way to explore the possible implications. Otherwise it’s all too abstract, all to clinical, all too remote, and therefore all too easy to ignore, at least until it actually begins to happen and we’re totally unprepared.
This post brought to you by author D.A. Hill
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