Inventing the Electronic Brain

Artificial Neurons Becoming a Meatspace Reality

The distance between physical and virtual realities is diminishing ever faster. In 2005 Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that many people living on earth today would, in their lifetimes, see a merging of humans and computers and the reality of human life on earth would fundamentally change in an event called the Singularity.

That event has come one step closer with the development of artificial neurons that mimic the neurons in our brains. On August 3rd, a group of researchers led by Evangelos Eleftheriou at IBM’s research laboratory in Zurich announced that they had built a working, artificial version of a neuron. Dr Eleftheriou’s invention consists of a tiny blob of germanium antimony telluride sandwiched between two electrodes... Read more at The Economist.

- Mike Marks