By now I managed to give away almost all of the 500 initial copies that I printed and am ready for a 2nd edition that will hopefully iron out the majority of the remaining spelling mistakes. So I thought it would add a nice touch if I got a few more testimonials and put them into the 2nd edition. So if you want to see your praise or constructive criticizm in print on Amazon do make sure to send me a 3-5 sentence blurp including name, URL, organization, title or whatever else you wish to add by the end of October 2009. I would really appreciate it!

For those of you willing to go beyond the call of duty, feel free to read over the final draft of the 2nd edition of Jame5 and let me know any errors my editor and me may have missed for the second time.

Last but not least: 2 years ago I thought self publishing Jame5 would be a good idea since what else could a big publisher do that I could not? Well – turns out that I do not have a marketing machine and while having ~1000 readers is nice, having 20’000 and someone else pay for distribution would be much nicer. So, since I still do not have a professional publisher, anyone with a good idea or connections on how to get Jame5 published properly, please do get in touch.

From the article:

If someone considers the development of artificial intelligence impossible or too far into the future to care about, I can only tell him or her, “Embrace the inevitable”. The advances in the field of neuroscience are increasing rapidly. Scientists are thorough. Understanding its benefits and pitfalls is all that is needed.

Hear, hear – my thoughts exactly. There is just one tiny little detail that raised my eyebrows about the project:

Well…, we will not be able to provide full details about the entire project because we are pursuing a business model, so that we can support the project in the future, so there is little chance of a collaboration with a University or other research institution.

Of course this was bound to happen…

Will neurologists scan our brains down to the last synapse and duplicate the wiring in a silicon chip, giving our minds eternal life?

Personally I do not feel that 100% understanding is required actually. We do not fully understand the universe but never the less come up with all kinds of useful gadgets that fulfill their intended functions within the margin of error between the applied theories used in their design and actual reality.

As long as we understand the brain well enough to improve it even just a little we will have a runaway intelligence explosion aka technological singularity.

In what could be one of the most ambitious computing projects ever, neuroscientists, computer engineers and psychologists are coming together in a bid to create an entirely new computing architecture that can simulate the brain’s abilities for perception, interaction and cognition. All that, while being small enough to fit into a lunch box and consuming extremely small amounts of power.

Together with the Blue Brain project as well as advances in memristor based electronics this project’s stated goal of building what amounts to a ‘brain in a lunch box’ is moving a lot of the science fiction in Jame5 into the realm of engineering. The fact that barely 18 months passed since Jame5′s initial publication speaks volumes about what is to be expected in the not so distant future. For a more technical background there is some very good material online about IBM Research’s Almaden Institute Conference on Cognitive Computing.

These guys are not playing around.

I have stumbled across two encouraging posts about Jame5 that I would like to share. The first is by Constantin Gonzalez from his BarCamp Munich 2008 summary:

Another great way to think about the future is to read Stefan Pernar’s sci-fi thriller “Jame5 – A Tale of Good and Evil”. This book starts in the best Michael Crichton style and then becomes a deep and thoughtful discussion around the philosophy of the future, when mankind confronts the powers of strong AI. [...] Highly recommended.

Secondly Marc Garnaut was kind enough to write about Jame5 on his blog:

I’ve been immersed in a book recently. It’s a fictional story, but it’s based on a lot of scientific fact. A bit like The Matrix or anything in the cyberpunk genre by authors like Neal Stephenson or William Gibson.

Much obliged gentlemen, much obliged indeed. Did I mention that I am still looking for a publisher? Hint! Hint!

They foresee a move from largely 2D chips towards 3D chips and acknowledge the importance of the recently discovered Memristor as well as breakthroughs in molecular transistor technology. Both significant discoveries in regards to keeping Moore’s Law relevant in the next decades.

The exact quote happens to escape me, but I recall having read something along the lines that in principles there are no natural laws preventing continued miniaturization in computation all the way down to the Planck scale.

IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do.

The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat’s brain.

Prof Modha says that the time is right for such a cross-disciplinary project because three disparate pursuits are coming together in what he calls a “perfect storm”.

Neuroscientists working with simple animals have learned much about the inner workings of neurons and the synapses that connect them, resulting in “wiring diagrams” for simple brains.

Supercomputing, in turn, can simulate brains up to the complexity of small mammals, using the knowledge from the biological research. Modha led a team that last year used the BlueGene supercomputer to simulate a mouse’s brain, comprising 55m neurons and some half a trillion synapses.

“But the real challenge is then to manifest what will be learned from future simulations into real electronic devices – nanotechnology,” Prof Modha said.

Technology has only recently reached a stage in which structures can be produced that match the density of neurons and synapses from real brains – around 10 billion in each square centimetre.

Does anyone else find it just a bit ironic that they aim for a cat brain next after having simulating a mouse brain at one tenth’s real time in April 2007?

The Future of Humanity Institute, founded and run by IEET founder and chair Nick Bostrom, has just published a roadmap of the scientific research and technological innovations required to eventually completely model the human brain in software.

Whole brain emulation (WBE) is the possible future one-to-one modelling of the function of the human brain. It represents a formidable engineering and research problem, yet one which appears to have a well-defined goal and could, it would seem, be achieved by extrapolations of current technology. Since the implications of successful WBE are potentially very large the Future of Humanity Institute hosted a workshop in Oxford on 26-27 May, 2007. Invited experts from areas such as computational neuroscience, brain-scanning technology, computing, and neurobiology presented their findings and discussed the possibilities, problems and milestones that would have to be reached before WBE becomes feasible. The result of the workshop is the following roadmap.

Progress seems unstoppable….

“While bringing the pleasure of storytelling, Jame5 is abundantly informed by theories of the Singularity, natural selection, and psychology. It’s like desert without the guilt because I learned while relaxing into the fine, captivating narrative.”

Thanks, Miguel! Appreciate it.