How to build a brain...Or a machine that thinks

Prof King and colleagues have spent the last decade developing “Robot Scientists” designed to automate discovery of scientific knowledge. Join as he discusses the philosophical motivation for this work: “What I cannot create, I do not understand” (Richard Feynman), and introduces you to Robot Scientists, Adam and Eve with their specific scientific projects. Professor King will discuss the hopes for their Robot Scientists – bringing real benefit to society.

The inner workings of the human brain remain a mystery to science, but computer models can help test hypotheses and advance our understanding of it. The SpiNNaker project has built a computer with half a million processors to support such models, and although this is nowhere near the scale of the human brain, it allows us to model brain regions and smaller brains in biological real time to try to get some insights into how this organ upon which we all so critically depend does what it does.

“Science makes a ‘brain’ that can play chess” was the Daily Mirror’s headline to introduce the first electronic computers in 1946. But the reality was less impressive, and many experts saw the idea of the “thinking machine” as likely to stoke fears of mass unemployment, robot takeovers, or simply disappointment. These researchers instead promoted the computer as a new calculating tool, lightning-fast but stupid, and fully human-controlled. This talk looks at how this vision clashed with the ideas of others, famously including Alan Turing, who took seriously the idea of “building a brain”.