Megabrain Project 
 Why? 
The Megabrain Project is about further development of the human brain.

This page addresses the question of why humans should develop bigger and better brains.

Historical perspective

Brains have been getting larger naturally for a long time now. The human brain is larger than that of most animals, having tripled in volume over the last three million years.

The human brain is primarily what has led to humans becoming the dominant species on the earth, with six and a half billion organisms and counting.

Computers

Modern times are witnessing the spectacular rise of the technology of computation.

The power of computers appears to be increasing geometrically, with the computing power available for a given cost doubling every eighteen months.

Already, computers have many advantages over traditional biological forms of computing:

Computer advantages

  • Communication speed - computers can communicate far faster than humans can;
  • Memory capacity - computers have much larger memories than humans;
  • Random access - the information in computers can be copied, duplicated and backed up;
  • Rapid serial computation - computers are good at doing a single sequence of things rapidly;
  • Arbitrarily programmable - computers excel at following instructions;
  • Determinism - computers be made to perform repeatably and reliably;
However, there are also some disadvantages:

Computer disadvantages

  • Poor parallelism - most computers are dreadful at doing many things at once;
  • Computer science is young - we still do not know how to program some fundamental things;
  • High cost - computer hardware is still relatively expensive;
  • High power consumption - computer hardware tends to be power hungry;
  • Poor heat dissipation - computer hardware tends to run hot;

Computers progress

Despite the primitive state of their hardware, computers have already become ubiquitous. They control the global communications network, which is rapidly becoming the preferred means of sending signals between any two points on the planet, and they have become important repositories of the world's knowledge.

However, there is still substantial demand for human intellectual capacity in some areas of the job market.

That situation may not last, though. Computers are still developing rapidly. Cost, power consumption and heat dissipation issues are rapidly improving - and it is estimated that $1000 computers will reach hardware-equivalence with the human brain by about the year 2020.

At some point, it seems likely that we will crack some of the computer-science problems associated with constructing thinking, learing machines by using neural networks, and similar systems - allowing the limitations of today's software development methodologies to be overcome and facilitating the construction of parallel hardware.

The power of engineering

Engineering is a powerful technique. It allows for the use of traditional strategies - such as natural selection. 'Reverse engineering' allows for the copying of existing solutions. Engineering also permits the use of approaches involving intelligence in the design and construction of organisms.

There is no way organisms which do not use engineering will be able to compete. In the future, [all living organisms will be engineered].

If nothing is done

Machines seem to have no qualms about using engineering techniques in order to improve themselves.

If the machine minds continue to develop while the human minds do not, the capabilities of machine minds look set to equal and surpass those of human minds fairly rapidly.

Man and machine intelligence seem unlikely to complement each other indefinitely. At some stage, economics will tend to favour the machines over humans as candidates for intellectually demanding roles. Corporations facing a choice between a human employee and a machine will start choosing the machine - and it won't just be factory and shop workers that are replaced.

The planet has limited resources and machines and humans will be placed into economic competition over them.

We will inevitably overlap in our demands for energy, elements, space and exhaust dumps. Over a period of time, the superior phenotype technologies seem likely to advance at the expense of older and archaic ones.

Uneven development

If machine techonolgy continues to develop while biological technology does not, machines will fairly rapidly outpace their biological predecessors.

The main result of this is likely to be a rapid transfer of power from the old organisms to the new ones.

The more rapidly this transfer happens, the less opportunity there will be for preserving the legacy of the old organisms, and the greater the chance will be that important technology is lost in the transfer process.

The slavery solution

Can humans stay in charge by enslaving the machines? A human at the head of an army of machines certainly does not suffer from the same disadvantages that a lone human faces - but humans would still eventually become dead weight. Organisations with higher machine-to-human ratios seem likely to proliferate at the expense of organisations with more humans.

Biological engineering

One possibility is developing biological organisms using the same engineering approaches that are being applied to machines - so they are not in such imminent danger of being overtaken by machines and winding up on nature's scrap heap.

The ideal would be to develop as close a symbiosis with the machines as is reasonably possible.

Rather than the new phenotypes replacing the old ones in a process of economic competition between separate organisms, the old phenotypes would gradually transform into the new ones.

Displacement

We live in a world of rapidly developing machines. They have no qualms about using engineering to improve themselves. By 2020, it seems likely that you'll be able to buy a computer with around the same computing capacity of the human brain for under $500, heralding the end of our reign as the smartest creatures on the planet. The world is rapidly filling up with metal, silicon and polymer sensors, actuators - and popular culture is full of stories of the machines taking over.

If the traditional carbon-nanotech organisms do not develop, then it doesn't take much imagination to see what will happen to them. They will turn into inefficient, obsolescent junk - and will wind up on nature's scrap heap.

The existing biological technology is probably ultimately destined for the scrap heap anyway.

However, neglecting to apply engineering principles to biology will only have the effect of accelerating the demise of those biological systems - whilst developing them and thus postponing their demise is likely to allow greater possibilities for a slow technological switch-over involving an extended period of symbiosis - rather than a short rapid shift.

A slow transformation seems likely to me to be less destructive - and will probably allow the most time for us to preserve the most important elements of the technology nature has developed. I think we should be aiming towards that.

Tim Tyler | Contact | http://megabrain.timtyler.org/