SIM/WBE Roadmap Iteration v3

This is the project to update to the next major iteration of the Roadmap towards Substrate-Independent Minds and Whole Brain Emulation. The project is expected to be completed around Dec.2013/Jan.2014.

In the previous iteration of the roadmap, four primary pillars of activity were formally identified and the formal method to accomplish a neuroprosthetic model description within the context of Whole Brain Emulation was characterized in terms of the engineering practice of System Identification. The four pillars identified are:

1. System decomposition into feasible sub-problems (Structure data acquisition; Connectomics).

2. System identification within feasible sub-systems (Functional data acquisition and characterization; Brain Activity Mapping).

3. Emulation resource development (Parameter estimation; Model representations; Neuromimetic hardware).

4. Iterative hypothesis testing (Measuring performance; Identifying further requirements; Roadmap improvement).

Since then, the state of the art in science and engineering within those four pillars has progressed significantly. Importantly, many projects have appeared in the last two years that explicitly aim to meet requirements for the second pillar, System Identification, by carrying out functional data acquisition at high resolution and large scale (Brain Activity Mapping).

That progress necessitates an update of the roadmap, so that routes to Substrate-Independent Minds are clear and up-to-date, so that new opportunities and new hurdles are acknowledged, and so that new Key Focal Points are identified. This project is crucial to the work of carboncopies.org, as it will specify best new angles of activity for our organization.

Updates of this project, and information about the resulting SIM/WBE Roadmap v3 will appear on this page.

Carboncopies.org intends to accompany each new iteration of the roadmap with a an Edition of The Substrate-Independent Minds and Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap Handbook. The Handbook will be a scholarly text that is intended to give clear and concrete insight into the roadmap and the state of the field, i.e. where are we in terms of progress towards achieving SIM, what is up next and how it can be done. The due date for the Handbook is not yet known.

Note that we are switching to an asymptotic versioning protocol for roadmap iterations, inspired by the versioning scheme used by Don Knuth in his TeX project. The underlying idea is that a choice of version numbers is fairly arbitrary, except that they should be a.) increasing, b.) should demonstrate an effort to asymptotically improve within a major version, and b.) should move to another version number when a major change, a re-imagining is undertaken. The next version of the roadmap will be v3, followed by v3.1, v3.14, etc. The major overhaul that follows will take it to versions v6, v6.2, v6.28, etc.