Energetics of the brain and AI

Does the energy requirements for the human brain give energy constraints that give reason to doubt the feasibility of artificial intelligence? This report will review some relevant estimates of brain bioenergetics and analyze some of the methods of estimating brain emulation energy requirements. Turning to AI, there are reasons to believe the energy requirements for de novo AI to have little correlation with brain (emulation) energy requirements since cost could depend merely of the cost of processing higher-level representations rather than billions of neural firings. Unless one thinks the human way of thinking is the most optimal or most easily implementable way of achieving software intelligence, we should expect de novo AI to make use of different, potentially very compressed and fast, processes

Development of Physics Applied to Medicine in the UK, 1945–90

Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 5 July 2005. Introduction by Dr Jeff Hughes.First published by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2006.©The Trustee of the Wellcome Trust, London, 2006.All volumes are freely available online at: www.history.qmul.ac.uk/research/modbiomed/wellcome_witnesses/Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 5 July 2005. Introduction by Dr Jeff Hughes.Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 5 July 2005. Introduction by Dr Jeff Hughes.Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 5 July 2005. Introduction by Dr Jeff Hughes.Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 5 July 2005. Introduction by Dr Jeff Hughes.Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 5 July 2005. Introduction by Dr Jeff Hughes.Annotated and edited transcript of a Witness Seminar held on 5 July 2005. Introduction by Dr Jeff Hughes.Organized with the assistance of Professor John Clifton (UCL) and chaired by Professor Peter Williams (Manchester), this seminar examined the early developments of medical physics in the UK between 1945 and 1990. Participants discussed a range of themes including medical physics before and during the war, the role of the King's Fund and the formation of the Hospital Physicists' Association (HPA), expansion of medical physics outside radiotherapy and to non-radiation physics (ultrasound, medical instrumentation, bioengineering, use of digital computers), developing regional services and links with industry. The seminar finished with a discussion on the changing scene in the 1980s, covering topics such as funding, academic and undergraduate medical physics, imaging, CT, NMR and others. Participants included Mr Tom Ashton, Dr Barry Barber, Professors Roland Blackwell and Terence Burlin, Dr Joseph Blau, Mr Bob (John) Burns, Professors John Clifton, David Delpy, Philip Dendy and Jack Fowler, Dr Jean Guy, Mr John Haggith, Drs John Haybittle, Alan Jennings and John Law, Professors John Mallard and Joe McKie, Mr David Murnaghan, Professor Angela Newing, Dr Sydney Osborn, Professor Rodney Smallwood, Dr Adrian Thomas, Dr Peter Tothill, Mr Theodore Tulley, Professors Peter Wells and John West, and Mr John Wilkinson. Christie D A, Tansey E M. (eds) (2006) Development of physics applied to medicine in the UK, 1945–90, Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine, vol. 28. London: The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL is funded by the Wellcome Trust, which is a registered charity, no. 210183

The future of human nature: a symposium on the promises and challenges of the revolutions in genomics and computer science, April 10, 11, and 12, 2003

This repository item contains a single issue of the Pardee Conference Series, a publication series that began publishing in 2006 by the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. This was the Center's Symposium on the Promises and Challenges of the Revolutions in Genomics and Computer Science took place during April 10, 11, and 12, 2003. Co-organized by Charles DeLisi and Kenneth Lewes; sponsored by Boston University, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.This conference focused on scientific and technological advances in genetics, computer science, and their convergence during the next 35 to 250 years. In particular, it focused on directed evolution, the futures it allows, the shape of society in those futures, and the robustness of human nature against technological change at the level of individuals, groups, and societies. It is taken as a premise that biotechnology and computer science will mature and will reinforce one another. During the period of interest, human cloning, germ-line genetic engineering, and an array of reproductive technologies will become feasible and safe. Early in this period, we can reasonably expect the processing power of a laptop computer to exceed the collective processing power of every human brain on the planet; later in the period human/machine interfaces will begin to emerge. Whether such technologies will take hold is not known. But if they do, human evolution is likely to proceed at a greatly accelerated rate; human nature as we know it may change markedly, if it does not disappear altogether, and new intelligent species may well be created

Distributed Control of Microscopic Robots in Biomedical Applications

Current developments in molecular electronics, motors and chemical sensors could enable constructing large numbers of devices able to sense, compute and act in micron-scale environments. Such microscopic machines, of sizes comparable to bacteria, could simultaneously monitor entire populations of cells individually in vivo. This paper reviews plausible capabilities for microscopic robots and the physical constraints due to operation in fluids at low Reynolds number, diffusion-limited sensing and thermal noise from Brownian motion. Simple distributed controls are then presented in the context of prototypical biomedical tasks, which require control decisions on millisecond time scales. The resulting behaviors illustrate trade-offs among speed, accuracy and resource use. A specific example is monitoring for patterns of chemicals in a flowing fluid released at chemically distinctive sites. Information collected from a large number of such devices allows estimating properties of cell-sized chemical sources in a macroscopic volume. The microscopic devices moving with the fluid flow in small blood vessels can detect chemicals released by tissues in response to localized injury or infection. We find the devices can readily discriminate a single cell-sized chemical source from the background chemical concentration, providing high-resolution sensing in both time and space. By contrast, such a source would be difficult to distinguish from background when diluted throughout the blood volume as obtained with a blood sample