[bognition]

Depends on how you define the near future. There's a bunch of reasons to be skeptical that we'll fully digitize a human connectome anytime soon.

First the fruit fry brain is very small. You can image the entire thing at the microscopic level with a single image. The human brain is massive by comparison. Getting a coherent image that traces an axon from the tip of frontal lobe to the back off the occipital lobe is going to be a huge challenge.

Second the fruit-fly brain has 25,000 neurons while the human brain has more than 10,000,000,000. There's 6 orders of magnitude difference there.

Third, it's highly likely that glia (non-neurons) in the brain play a major role in neural computation so we'll have to image those too. Humans have way more glia than most other animals.

Lastly the connectivity of neurons in the human brain is very high. Getting those little connections right is key in all this as we aren't just going for the neurons but the connections between them.

[nick_kline]

If you can handle 25k neurons today that's roughly 19 binary orders of magnitude to 10 billion or less than 38 years of Moore's law type doubling, calling it 2 years instead of 18 months per double. So not that scary. There are different kinds of doubling and who knows if it will keep on keeping on.

[trhway]

>Second the fruit-fly brain has 25,000 neurons while the human brain has more than 10,000,000,000. There's 6 orders of magnitude difference there.

>Lastly the connectivity of neurons in the human brain is very high.

yep, the human brain is 100B neurons and has 10e4 connections per neuron while the fly brain has 10e3 connections/neuron. So we need to emulate 10e15 connections of the human brain. GPT-3 has 175B of weights.

[aeternum]

Right, but GPT-2 had 1.5 billion neurons in 2019 so GPT-3 was a 100x increase. 1e15 may not be that far off, especially since these operations are relatively straightforward to run in parallel.