[MURG] new Road Map draft

[king-yin yan]

From: cat13 at illrepute.org
>My first question is, "what's our next step?"  According to your roadmap,
>the places to start are bi-directional interfacing (which we already have),
>metallic electrodes (which we already have), the Moravec robot (which I
>don't know how we'd get to), lesioning techniques, the cyberworm project,
>and vitrification.

Just a quick reply: I intended a "time-line" on the vertical axis, but
some items have to be fixed. For example, "How does brain store
info" is already under active research. The things on the horizontal
axis are independent of each other and can (and should) be developed
concurrently. This is very natural, researchers in different fields
usually work independently.

People in the neurosurgery field are developing surgical robots now,
which will provide a lot of useful techniques for MU. In fact all the
terminal nodes of the tree are under active progress. It's imperative
that we keep track of all relevant developments in these fields.

>So, since we already have a bunch of those, and one is out of our reach, it
>sounds like, according to your roadmap, we (and by "we" I mean the human
>race) should be working on lesioning and vitrification, and (for the
>purposes of MU) nothing else.  Is that accurate?

Quite the contrary! Parallel developments is more like it. This will
happen anyways, with or without us.

>Then, later on down the line, we start figuring out how the brain encodes
>information, and possibly figure out how to identify cells and how to
>support the brain outside of the body.  Am I reading this correctly so far?

I placed "How brain encodes info" a bit low because I expected
a complete understanding of this will take some time, but it's
just an uneducated guess, I should correct that next. In fact,
we already have many plausible brain theories. One caveat is
that doing a time-line (especially future prediction) is a major
problem and should deserve much more thinking.

>If these are the case, then is this a comprehensive map?
>It's saying that as long as we have the whole-brain map, lesioning
>techniques, and either "soft" probes or the combination of hard probes and
>the Moravec surgeon, then we'll have everything we need to develop the
>gradual-replacement version of MU.  Is there anything you would want to
>change, add, or remove?

I'll try to think. Most likely the next step is further break-down
of the nodes.

>I'm asking because I would like to merge your ideas with a larger picture.
>With that in mind, is there anything you want me to make a special note of?

Cool. That'll let us compare different MU approaches =)




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