Startup aims to sell a brain implant to improve memory

[d_r]

@MostlyDiff

That’s not at all what I’m getting at. I have no doubt that computers can now or will some day be able to emulate many if not all of the functions of the brain.[/quote]
That word “emulate” poisons the well. The idea that there is some magical extra thing that is going on in the human brain but is impossible to do in a computer is a thesis that has been around for many years - it is the crux of the two influential books by Hubert Dreyfus - but as we learn more about how the brain functions and AI increases in sophistication it becomes an increasingly untenable thesis.

[quote]you begin to draw a quite inaccurate conception of how the BRAIN works and what the BRAIN can do. Brain memory does not behave like computer memory. Brain learning does not behave like computer learning.

Well, I do have a little exposure to the science of brain operation, mainly through osmosis from being married to a research neuroscientist who studies the electrochemisty of the brain. My experience is that while such experts might find fault with any given project in AI, few would deny that the brain is a computer that is not fundamentally different from those we’ve had in hardware for decades and on paper since the 1930s. At least in academics, the only people who seriously argue otherwise tend to be far removed from the actual scientific study of such things.