this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
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[–] [email protected] 185 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (8 children)

"We did the back-of-napkin math on what ramping up this experiment to the entire brain would cost, and the scale is impossibly large — 1.6 zettabytes of storage costing $50 billion and spanning 140 acres, making it the largest data center on the planet."

Look at what they need to mimic just a fraction of our power.

[–] [email protected] 52 points 6 months ago

It’s not even complete. You might have the physical brain tissue, but that tissue is stateful. The tissue contains potentials and electrical charges that must be included in a complete model.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Heh, we the best. Now excuse me while I use my amazing brainpower to watch questionable anime and get more depressed 🫥

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Every day we stray further from God's light lol

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

naruto-running from his light

[–] [email protected] 38 points 6 months ago

it's not like human brain memory or consciousness is that information dense. They just did that high of a definition of a scan.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (1 children)

In fairness, the scan required such astronomical resources because of how they were scanning it. They took the cubic millimeter chunk and cut it into 5,000 super thin flat slices and then did extremely high detail scans of each slice. That's why they needed AI, to try and piece those flat layers back together into some sort of 3D structure.

Once they have the 3D structure, the scans are useless and can be deleted.

In time it should be possible to scan the tissue and get the 3D structure without such extreme data use.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Imagine donating your body to science and the scientists slice your brain and scan them, then decades later you suddenly wake up in a virtual space because the scientists are finally able to emulate a copy of your brain in a supercomputer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sounds good to me. You should also look into cryonics. Basically you sign up with a company and donate your body to them, when you die they pump you full of antifreeze and then vitrify you in liquid nitrogen. Right now there's no way to recover from it, the antifreeze is toxic and we don't yet know how to undo the cell damage from freezing. But the idea is someday in the future we will figure those things out, and then hopefully be able to thaw the frozen dead person, fix the damage caused by the freezing process, fix whatever problem killed them in the first place, and reanimate them.

For a lower fee, they will cut off your head and just freeze that. Idea being that someday in the future they will be able to transplant your brain into an artificially created body.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

But they really only unfreeze people who knew Richard Dawkins and Mrs. Garrison. Then laugh at you when you want to play Nintendo Wii.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

And the whole human body, brain and all, can run on ~100 watts. Truly astounding.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

And we get these 100W from transforming food that we find on/in the ground.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Shouldn't be long and we will have that much in our phones.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

CERN datacenter has 1600 times less capacity

https://home.cern/news/news/computing/exabyte-disk-storage-cern

Although global storage capacity will be 125 times higher by 2025 than whole scan would occupy

https://cybersecurityventures.com/the-world-will-store-200-zettabytes-of-data-by-2025/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I'd be curious about the access speed comparison, because I'd assume for the brain it's be RAM equivalent, not SDD

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

The brain is a tightly coupled biological computer , it's access speed is practically instantaneous

Also data/processing in the brain is some mighty uncovered field of science

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Just gotta lower the clock speed enough for us not to notice. As long as we don’t interact with the outside world, just other stored human brains, it can be slow as molasses and we won’t notice.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

Sort of makes you realize how daunting self driving cars are.