jdray's Journal: Constructing Machine Consciousness

Seed Magazine is carrying an article about Blue Brain, a project to model a complete mind inside a supercomputer. The current state of the project has a single neocortical column, the basic computational element of a brain, of a two-week old rat working. The project manager indicates that the biggest hurdle holding them back is computing horsepower to scale the experiments. With current technology, they estimate that running a model of a complete human mind would cost $3 billion annually in electricity alone.