Hi ! Very interesting post, I agree that connectomics might be most interesting for the “other stuff” and perhaps not the cortical areas. Well sourced post overall, but I wanted to add my perspective, as someone recently come to work in micro scale connectomics. I think you are not crazy to hope for those timelines, but I think you are unfortunately wrong. Led by our lab at Princeton, we have released the first adult whole brain fruit fly connectome: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546656v1 it is a great milestone, and some are already starting to do whole drosophila brain emulation (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.02.539144v1) based on it, to some initial success. I think you should recalibrate your expectations, my understanding of the consensus, based on talking to my colleagues (who are actual neuroscientists, unlike me, a software engineer) it’s possible that we could make it to a whole mouse brain connectome in roughly a decade, but that is somewhat optimistic. There are fundamental barriers to scaling our imaging techniques that will need to be solved before scaling to larger brains. Additionally the greatest bottleneck currently is proofreading of the connectome. The automated processes will get better, but as of yet, human proofreading is still absolutely necessary, and obtaining ground truth for training better reconstruction models is likewise difficult. Overall, optimistically, I think whole primate brain connectomes are feasible in the next few decades. I am pretty firmly of the belief that AGI by other means will arrive well before WBE.
Hi ! Very interesting post, I agree that connectomics might be most interesting for the “other stuff” and perhaps not the cortical areas. Well sourced post overall, but I wanted to add my perspective, as someone recently come to work in micro scale connectomics. I think you are not crazy to hope for those timelines, but I think you are unfortunately wrong. Led by our lab at Princeton, we have released the first adult whole brain fruit fly connectome: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546656v1 it is a great milestone, and some are already starting to do whole drosophila brain emulation (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.02.539144v1) based on it, to some initial success. I think you should recalibrate your expectations, my understanding of the consensus, based on talking to my colleagues (who are actual neuroscientists, unlike me, a software engineer) it’s possible that we could make it to a whole mouse brain connectome in roughly a decade, but that is somewhat optimistic. There are fundamental barriers to scaling our imaging techniques that will need to be solved before scaling to larger brains. Additionally the greatest bottleneck currently is proofreading of the connectome. The automated processes will get better, but as of yet, human proofreading is still absolutely necessary, and obtaining ground truth for training better reconstruction models is likewise difficult. Overall, optimistically, I think whole primate brain connectomes are feasible in the next few decades. I am pretty firmly of the belief that AGI by other means will arrive well before WBE.