Comment Kurzweil is wrong, but read it in context (Score 1) 830
Kurzweil doesn't explicitly say that we'll be able to reverse engineer the human brain because it will run on only "1 million lines of code." What he probably meant to say is that we'll do it in 10 years because all the other factors that will go into it (increase in brain scanning technology, computer simulations, computing power etc.) will allow us to reach that point in 10 years. The original Gizmodo/Wired article which TFA article points to includes Kurzweil's claim that we "only need 25 MB, or a million lines of code" to simulate the human brain. While that (admittedly incorrect) element is part of Kurzweil's argument, it doesn't necessarily negate a claim that we'll still be able to build simulations of the brain in a decade.
The original Wired/Gizmodo article that PZ Myers points to is focused on the ability to emulate the software of the cortex within a supercomputer.
The key to reverse-engineering the human brain lies in decoding and simulating the cerebral cortex - the seat of cognition. The human cortex has about 22 billion neurons and 220 trillion synapses. A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn't exist yet. Researchers would require a machine with a computational capacity of at least 36.8 petaflops and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes - a scale that supercomputer technology isn't expected to hit for at least three years, according to IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha. Modha leads the cognitive computing project at IBM's Almaden Research Center. By next year, IBM's ‘Sequoia' supercomputer should be able to offer 20 petaflops per second peak performance, and an even more powerful machine will be likely in two to three years. "Reverse-engineering the brain is being pursued in different ways," says Kurzweil. "The objective is not necessarily to build a grand simulation - the real objective is to understand the principle of operation of the brain." Reverse engineering the human brain is within reach, agrees Terry Sejnowski, head of the computational neurobiology lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.
That last line is probably wildly incorrect, but it doesn't really change the basis of the argument. It's not infeasible that we could reach this in a decade. Look at this TED talk from 2009: http://www.ted.com/talks/henry_markram_supercomputing_the_brain_s_secrets.html where Henry Markram claims he's able to simulate a single neocortical column on a neuronal level in a supercomputer.
Now go back to TFA:
I'll make a prediction, too. We will not be able to plug a single unknown protein sequence into a computer and have it derive a complete description of all of its functions by 2020. Conceivably, we could replace this step with a complete, experimentally derived quantitative summary of all of the functions and interactions of every protein involved in brain development and function, but I guarantee you that won't happen either. And that's just the first step in building a simulation of the human brain derived from genomic data. It gets harder from there.
PZ Myers is probably correct about that: we won't be able to plug in an amino acid sequence into a computer and then figure out what it looks like in 3D, and how it interacts on a molecular scale. But that argument doesn't negate the fact that we are still making incredible strides in understanding the hardware and software of the Human Brain. It just proves that Kurzweil doesn't know what he's talking about as to HOW we'll be able to simulate it. I think it's wrong of PZ Myers to dismiss the entirety of the project and the rest of the neuroscience community that's working on this project and have an optimistic goal for it simply because Ray Kurzweil came out in support of it with his incorrect logic.