In the long term, if and when these things become mass-produced and cheap, people may want to do terrible things to them, in the same vein as animal torture. That may be when laws get put in place to protect them.
Suppose you, at one stage, have a simulation of a brain that isn't quite there; it talks and sees, but it's audio system doesn't work right. What do you do?
Even live debugging to repair it can be controversial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Criticism_and_...)
Ethical? That's the question.
Furthermore I'm pretty sure a human brain also maintains various bodily functions, which use some percentage of the brain's computational power.
I also suspect that strong AI is probably not as complicated as we think, it's just that no one has thought of the correct set of ideas required for strong AI to emerge.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157
And the Riken Lab press release
http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/
This is a link to the poster presentation. There does not seem to be a full paper associated with this research yet.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/S1/P163
The NEST simulator (The researchers Morrison and Diesman are integral people on this project):
http://www.nest-initiative.org/index.php/Software:About_NEST
When I hear AI being discussed LISP comes up fairly often. In the book "Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega" by Greg Chaitin, he mentions that Kurt Godel's work had a notation that was uncannily similar to LISP code. On the other paw he compares Turing's idea of code as something more akin to machine code.
So... 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller than a human brain. From Wikipedia:
> One estimate puts the human brain at about 100 billion (10^11) neurons and 100 trillion (10^14) synapses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Neurons_in_the_brain
Assuming linear scaling, that would put an actual simulated second of human brain neural activity somewhere between 6 hours and 2 days.
More detail is here in the original press release: http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/
There's a wide-spread assumption that knowing the brain's connectivity will be sufficient to emulate its function, but there's so much about the underlying molecular and electrical properties of neurons that we know nothing about.
It's somewhat analogous to having a circuit diagram where the components are missing. Dropping in random components but preserving the wiring structure won't result in the same functionality.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57597049-1/fujitsu-super...
It also says "The synapses were randomly connected" among other more even handed discussion of what happened.
It took K around 40 minutes to simulate just 1 single second of human brain activity, even with all of its performance prowess. The experiment on simulated human brain activity involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells that were connected to 10.4 trillion virtual synapses, with every virtual synapse containing 24 bytes of memory.
There's no way the brain in my head could simulate 1.73bn nerve cells in 40 minutes.
