He left Japan in frustration with its culture, and with his brain-building project only half done. As he puts it, I lived in Japan because I felt that country offered me the best opportunities to achieve my long term dream of building artificial brains . However, Japan's suppression of big egoed individualism, its utter intolerance of western criticisms of its third world social, political and intellectual values, simply enraged me. I had to leave its intellectual sterility to have a life of the mind . It s a culture that is first world materially, but third world socially, and is quite unsuited for the vast majority of westerners to live in - too socially backward, too insular, too uncosmopolitan, too closed, too racist, too chauvinist, too passively obedient, too feudal, too fascist for westerners to tolerate.
Japan needs two generations of heavy social engineering to catch up with the west socially.
It s a device of incredible power. Unlike the general-purpose computers we use everyday, it s built specifically to do one thing. It combines genetic algorithms, a computational simulation of evolution by natural selection, with neural networks, a computational simulation of the brain. It holds a huge number of little neural networks, computer programs roughly emulating the structure of the brain. It can pass information between these neural networks, and create new neural networks by evolving them according to specified fitness criteria.