What is a cognitive computer? It’s a computer that mimics the way our brain processes data. Traditionally computers separate programs from data stored in memory. IBM’s new architecture distributes processing and memory within the same circuits aping the brain’s neurons and synapses.

This is much better than parallel processing, the architecture behind Watson. The IBM announcement follows on the heels of a previous announcement about Blue Matter, a computer that simulates a complete cat brain.

At the Supercomputing show in Portland, Oregon, Jeffrey Burt of eWeek reports that IBM researchers announced yesterday that they have achieved two major milestones, the first almost real-time cortical simulation of the brain that goes beyond that of a cat cortex, and the development of an algorithm that makes use of IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputing architecture to map the connections between cortical and subcortical areas in the human brain.

A collaboration among researchers at IBM, Stanford, University of Wisconsin, Cornell, Columbia University Medical Center and University of California-Merced, the cognitive computing project team is striving to create a computer that evaluates and acts similarly to the human brain.

The research is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) initiative called SYNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics). This computer brain uses 147,456 processors and 144TB of main memory. The algorithm that the researchers have created lets them experiment on how brain structure affects function.

Dharmendra Modha, Manager of Cognitive Computing at IBM Research-Almaden, makes the following comments on his blog: “While we have algorithms and computers to deal with structured data….and semi-structured data, no mechanisms exist that parallel the brain’s uncanny ability to act in a context-dependent fashion while integrating ambiguous information across different senses (for example, sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell) and coordinating multiple motor modalities. Success of cognitive computing will allow us to mine the boundary between digital and physical worlds where raw sensory information abounds. Imagine, for example, instrumenting the world’s oceans with temperature, pressure, wave height, humidity and turbidity sensors, and imagine streaming this information in real-time to a cognitive computer that may be able to detect spatiotemporal correlations, much like we can pick out a face in a crowd. We think that cognitive computing has the ability to profoundly transform the world and bring about entirely new computing architectures and, possibly even, industries.”

Pattern recognition is the basis of crude artificial intelligence. It is the type of intelligence that we see in Amazon and other marketing sites that identify buying habits and make suggestions for future purchases.

Consciousness and self-awareness are an entirely different type of intelligence. When I was very young I had a pet parakeet named Twinkles. Twinkles spent hours looking in his mirror and pecking away at the image he saw. Was he aware that he was looking at himself the entire time? Biologists who study bird intelligence do not associate self-awareness with parakeets. However they do associate it with crows and other corvids as well as some breeds of parrots. Corvids, in particular, members of the raven, crow, and blackbirds show a high degree of intelligence that indicates self-awareness. Experiments with several of these birds show that when they look in a mirror and see something on their feathers, they then look at themselves and remove whatever they see. They also anticipate behaviour of other members in their group or outsiders who enter into their territory.

Can a computer today display that kind of intelligence? No but we are clearly on a path to developing the technology to build artificial minds that will more than exceed the cleverness of crows, approaching the intelligence of humans in many ways.

Should we limit the artificial intelligence we can create? In Isaac Asimov’s science fiction novels that feature robots he establishes a number of basic codes of conduct that govern robotic behaviour. Asimov’s laws include:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Will this make human beings lazy? If you remember when scientific calculators replaced slide rules, did it make us lazy? Not really. It contributed to an explosive growth in scientific research and discovery including the development of modern computers. So I don’t believe that we need to limit artificial intelligence other than conformity to laws that we can build into the algorithms we write and that our artificial intelligences adopt as their equivalent to the Ten Commandments.