Asimov Press • 425 implied HN points • 26 Jan 26
- New lab technologies and AI tools have rapidly lowered the cost and time needed to map neurons, so faithful brain emulations for small animals could appear in a few years and mouse-to-human scale emulations are plausible within decades if big investments continue.
- Creating full emulations requires three things — recording neural activity, reconstructing the wiring (connectome), and building accurate computational neuron models — and the biggest bottleneck is getting aligned, high-quality biological data and automating the tedious proofreading steps.
- Accurate brain emulations could become powerful discovery tools for neuroscience, drug development, and studying consciousness, but they will be costly, ethically complicated, and the first models will probably be generic population-style brains rather than perfect copies of individual people.