This TED Talk features economists and social scientist Robin Hansen, recorded live at TED 2017.

Someday we may have robots as smartest people.

Artificial intelligence, AI. How could that happen?

One route is that we'll just keep accumulating better software like we've been doing for 70 years.

At past rates of progress, that may take centuries.

Some say it'll happen a lot faster as we discover grand new, powerful theories of intelligence.

I'm skeptical.

But a third scenario

is what I'm going to talk about today.

The idea is to port the software from the human brain.

To do this, we're going to need three technologies to be good enough,

and none of other there yet.

First, we're going to need lots of cheap, fast, parallel computers.

Second, we're going to need to scan individual human brains

and find spatial and chemical detail to see exactly what cells are where, connected of what, or what type.

And third, we're going to need computer models of how each kind of brain cell works,

taking input signals, changing intertrial state, and sending output signals.

We have good enough models of all the kinds of brain cells and a good enough model of a brain.

We can put it together to make a good enough model of an entire brain, and that model would have the same input-output behavior as the original.

So, if you talk to it, it might talk back, if you ask it to do things, it might do them,

and if we could do that, everything would change.

People have been talking about this idea for decades.

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