IBM  announced today that they have created BlueMatter — a near real-time simulation of a cat’s cerebral cortex. AP says:

“The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat’s brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in a cat’s brain work together.”

This is a major step towards their attempt to build cognitive computers.  It allows them to map the brain and figure out how it processes information with the goal of replicating it.  It took a HUGE computer to simulate a cat’s brain.

“The computer has 147,456 processors (most modern PCs have just one or two processors) and 144 terabytes of main memory — 100,000 times as much as your computer has.”

Cognitive computers will be faster, less energy intensive and smaller.  IBM says:

“The long-term mission of IBM’s cognitive computing initiative is to discover and demonstrate the algorithms of the brain and deliver low-power, compact cognitive computers that approach mammalian-scale intelligence and use significantly less energy than today’s computing systems.”

This style of computer will handle problems in a fundamentally different way than the computers we use today.

“Modern computing is based on a stored program model, which has traditionally been implemented in digital, synchronous, serial, centralized, fast, hardwired, general-purpose circuits with explicit memory addressing that indiscriminately over-write data and impose a dichotomy between computation and data. In stark contrast, cognitive computing – like the brain – will use replicated computational units, neurons and synapses that are implemented in mixed-mode analog-digital, asynchronous, parallel, distributed, slow, reconfigurable, specialized and fault-tolerant biological substrates with implicit memory addressing that only update state when information changes, blurring the boundary between computation and data.”

So basically, IBM is working on making our computers as smart as mammals so that they can better respond to the overwhelming amount of data in today’s world.  No doubt, copyright-infringers and other “terrorists” will be hunted like mice by simulated cats while PR people and social media experts, most of whom have more of an insect level of intelligence, will be put out of work.

And none of this is really all that new.  Years and years ago, Raymond Scott was writing song-things about IBM and the Paperwork Explosion, saying that machines should do the work and men should do the thinking. Now machines will do the thinking, foreigners will do the work and we’ll do the shopping.

Same as it ever was.