9 BUILDING GIANT BRAINS

If you want to build an artificially intelligent machine, why not build an artificial brain? This is an obvious plan: The human brain is the source of human intelligence, and so if we could copy it somehow, we would expect to reproduce at least some aspects of intelligence. This attractive approach has been tried before, and there are several ongoing projects in this area. The big snag with "copying the brain somehow" is that no one has yet figured out how the brain actually works. Modern neuroscience has made rapid progress in recent years, but despite gaining much understanding of specific detail, the big picture remains elusive. We still can't answer questions such as, "How is thought generated and held in the brain?" or "How did I store that memory or make that decision?"