dgarbett - Slashdot User

Ray Kurzweil's Vision of the Singularity, In Movie Form 366

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 06, 2009 @03:36PM from the seems-to-invite-some-polite-skepticism dept.

destinyland writes "AI researcher Ben Goertzel peeks at the new Ray Kurzweil movie (Transcendent Man), and gives it 'two nano-enhanced cyberthumbs way, way up!' But in an exchange with Kurzweil after the screening, Goertzel debates the post-human future, asking whether individuality can survive in a machine-augmented brain. The documentary covers radical futurism, but also includes alternate viewpoints. 'Would I build these machines, if I knew there was a strong chance they would destroy humanity?' asks evolvable hardware researcher Hugo de Garis. His answer? 'Yeah.'" Note, the movie is about Kurzweil and futurism, not by Kurzweil. Update: 05/06 20:57 GMT by T : Note, Singularity Hub has a review up, too.

Comment Re:I really love Fallout. (Score -1) 397

by dgarbett on Monday November 03, 2008 @08:47PM (#25620485) Attached to: <em>Fallout 3</em> Launches Amidst Controversy

The original fallout games were predecessors of Baldurs Gate. If you like them keep playing them. However the original fallout 3 (Van something or other) was canceled because it was too crap.

Mapping the Brain's Neural Network 143

Posted by kdawson on Saturday November 24, 2007 @03:40PM from the next-to-figure-out-the-programming dept.

Ponca City, We Love You writes "New technologies could soon allow scientists to generate a complete wiring diagram of a piece of brain. With an estimated 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses in the human brain, creating an all-encompassing map of even a small chunk is a daunting task. Only one organism's complete wiring diagram now exists: that of the microscopic worm C. elegans, which contains a mere 302 neurons. The C. elegans mapping effort took more than a decade to complete. Research teams at MIT and at Heidelberg in Germany are experimenting with different approaches to speed up the process of mapping neural connections. The Germans start with a small block of brain tissue and bounce electrons off the top of the block to generate a cross-sectional picture of the nerve fibers. They then take a very thin slice, 30 nanometers, off the top of the block. 'Repeat this [process] thousands of times, and you can make your way through maybe the whole fly brain,' says the lead researcher. They are training an artificial neural network to emulate the human process of tracing neural connections to speed the process about 100- to 1000-fold. They estimate that they need a further factor of a million to analyze useful chunks of the human brain in reasonable times."

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