Bad article; lots of hyperbole, no real details on what the computational units are like, and why they are cool.
Brains are a non-von-neumann architecture, yes, and brains can do cool stuff. But there's a huge complexity challenge to using a particular new architecture to do the things brains do.
Even if we had an architecture that perfectly physically modelled the low level components of the brain, there'd be a huge gulf in understanding to be crossed before we could connect the components properly to do useful things.
Imagine its 1700, and a traveller from the future gives a gift of a set of FPGAs - easy to program with whatever logic gates people want.
How long would it be before people build the first desktop computing environment?
There isn't even any boolean algebra around at that time; people wouldn't know where to start wiring the logic blocks together to do useful things; all of computer science still needs to be discovered.
We should read articles that claim new architecture X is like the brain, and will hence do brain like things Y, sceptical that there's a whole new science in the gulf of understanding that needs to be crossed to get from X to Y.
Brains are a non-von-neumann architecture, yes, and brains can do cool stuff. But there's a huge complexity challenge to using a particular new architecture to do the things brains do.
Even if we had an architecture that perfectly physically modelled the low level components of the brain, there'd be a huge gulf in understanding to be crossed before we could connect the components properly to do useful things.
Imagine its 1700, and a traveller from the future gives a gift of a set of FPGAs - easy to program with whatever logic gates people want. How long would it be before people build the first desktop computing environment?
There isn't even any boolean algebra around at that time; people wouldn't know where to start wiring the logic blocks together to do useful things; all of computer science still needs to be discovered.
We should read articles that claim new architecture X is like the brain, and will hence do brain like things Y, sceptical that there's a whole new science in the gulf of understanding that needs to be crossed to get from X to Y.