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IBM tries to sell brains to US politicians

by on26 February 2015


They have been without them for so long

For a while now US politics has been dominated by those who think God created the world in seven days, climate change is a fabrication, and women enjoy being raped, but IBM thinks it can fix the terminal stupidity.

IBM scientists came to Capitol Hill to sell lawmakers on the company's new computing chips, which are designed to mimic the connections made by neurons in the human brain.

IBM chief scientist Dharmendra Modha said that once developed postage-stamp-sized chips could power high-tech glasses that identify nearby objects for the wearer or desktop computers with supercomputing capabilities.

Dubbed "syNAPSE" technology — which stands for "systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics" — is funded in part by a 2008 grant from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which encouraged scientists to create low-power computers that can scale to levels found in brains found in nature.

IBM tested a prototype that could play the computer game Pong in 2011, and unveiled the chip in August 2014. IBM's eventual goal is to build a "brain in a box" that consumes 1 kilowatt of power, Modha said.

Modha and panelists from various national laboratories emphasized potential applications in national security
syNAPSE technology is still in its early stages.

IBM plans to hand out chip boards to universities so they can study its potential, Modha said. And scientists are still researching how much the chip technology can scale to create more complex supercomputers, said Horst Simon, deputy director for the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

It is not clear what the response of the politicians was, but we guess that more than one of them was worried that it might end up with them bringing in the mark of the beast.

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