This interesting article in the New York Times got me thinking. We seem to be at a computational crossroad. If we are really about to hit a wall with respect to improving processing speed and power with traditional scaling techniques (though see this interesting article on a recent breakthrough in spintronics and this article on the prospects for single-atom sized transistors for additional candidates to the speculative nanowire and DNA origami talked about in the NY Times article) then the hopes of the Blue Brain project of having a simulated human brain within 10 years may be doomed. I wonder what other think of this? It seems to me that if we can’t bust through this barrier then physicalist theorizing will take a dramatic hit…
Interesting question (and thanks for sharing these links). I don’t see a threat to the Blue Brain project or physicalist theorizing (what do you mean by that?) from the challenges of building smaller circuits. At most, it may take longer than expected to reach a certain level of computational power per $$.
But the challenges of building circuits at the nanoscale are definitely fascinating in their own right. It will be interesting to see which of the many technologies under development will prove effective.
I guess my thought was that I hear talk of people saying that we should have computers that are capable of competing with the brain for computational power by 2025 (or so) but that assumes that we will continue to be able to improve processing speed in the way that we have. But this article suggests that we may not even make it past the 2012 cycle (am I remembering that right?)…so unless we find the next solution we won’t be able to simulate a human brain. Though I agree that it may just delay it until one of these other technologies takes off (but that’s assuming that one of them will)…