Neuroscience has yet to answer this question. But even if the answer is favorable, the scale-up from a mouse brain to a human brain (and to human-level intelligence) is huge. The engineering challenge here is not merely to achieve the required number of FLOPS (floating point operations per second) but to do so in a small volume and with low power consumption. The average human brain (male) occupies a mere 1,250 cm3 and consumes just 20 W. By contrast, the Tianhe-2, the world’s most powerful supercomputer in 2013, consumes 24 MW and is housed in a complex occupying 720 m2. Yet it still has only
...more
