World’s First Artificial Mind

South-African Israeli Professor Henry Markram, a doctor-turned-computer engineer has announced his team would create the world’s first artificial conscious and intelligent mind by 2018, reports The Mail.

His words staggered the erudite audience gathered at a technology conference in Oxford last summer.

On the shore of Lake Geneva, this brilliant, eccentric scientist is building an artificial mind. A Swiss – it could only be Swiss – precision- engineered mind, made of silicon, gold and copper.

The end result will be a creature, if we can call it that, which its maker believes within a decade may be able to think, feel and even fall in love.

Professor Markram’s ‘Blue Brain’ project, must rank as one of the most extraordinary endeavours in scientific history.

If this 47-year-old South-African Israeli is successful, then the world will witness the first of the Frankensteins. The world will be on the verge of realising an age-old fantasy, one first imagined when an adolescent Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, her tale of an artificial monster brought to life – a story written, quite coincidentally, just a few miles from where this extraordinary experiment is now taking place.

Success will bring with it philosophical, moral and ethical conundrums of the highest order, and may force us to confront what it means to be human.

But Professor Markram thinks his artificial mind will render vivisection obsolete, conquer insanity and even improve our intelligence and ability to learn.

What Markram’s project amounts to is an audacious attempt to build a computerised copy of a brain – starting with a rat’s brain, then progressing to a human brain – inside one of the world’s most powerful computers.

This, it is hoped, will bring into being a sentient mind that will be able to think, reason, express will, lay down memories and perhaps even experience love, anger, sadness, pain and joy.

‘We will do it by 2018,’ says the professor confidently. ‘We need a lot of money, but I am getting it. There are few scientists in the world with the resources I have at my disposal.’

There is, inevitably, scepticism. But even Markram’s critics mostly accept that he is on to something and, most importantly, that he has the money.

Tens of millions of euros are flooding into his laboratory at the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne – paymasters include the Swiss government, the EU and private backers, including the computer giant IBM. Artificial minds are, it seems, big business.