Simulating, not emulating.

Yes, the first phase has been successful, maybe even later phases will be successful.

But it all depends on how you define success.

Let's pretend we're living on an island and we are looking up in to the sky and we see aircraft flying over. Instead of going the 'cargo cult' route to building an aircraft we are a bit smarter and we realize it must be their forward speed that somehow holds them up.

So, we build a windtunnel, aim it into the prevailing winds and we make little wooden planes to test our theories of aircraft.

Sometimes the winds are strong enough to give us a meaningful result.

The shapes will check out, all kinds of stuff will be learned that is useful for making airplanes.

And that's where we get stuck, in spite of all our fantastic work in early 'phases' we do not have a functioning aircraft. For that we need other technology that we do not have and that we will not be able to simply acquire by looking at an airplane or even taking apart a crashed one. You need access to a functioning airplane for that, and preferably someone that can explain what technologies went in to building it and how important the various tolerances are. There is more to making an airplane than just the outside view of it. But there are many ways of making things fly, such as a balloon, a rocket or even a glider. Any one of those might be valid for our purpose of making an aircraft and by studying physics (the brain analogy breaks down here) you would learn what really goes in to making an aircraft.

For me there is only one phase here that you could claim to be successful or not with respect to the project as a whole, which is to have the thing become sentient, learning a spoken language or so and then to start asking critical questions.

All the other 'phases' are mechanistic and so will all be achieved for sure.

The last one is the only one that matters.

I'm sure we will learn a ton about how 'brains work' at a mechanical/chemical/electrochemical level. But the input data is the wiring diagram + the chemical composition of some of the ingredients.

If it would be that easy then it should be possible to restore dead people as well, but it seems that something crucial is broken when a brain is without oxygen for even a very short period. What that is is a big mystery. Religious people call it 'soul', technical people call it 'state'.

If you compare the brain with an Eniac style machine where the program is stored in the connections between the neurons then you have to also take into account that the brain is rewiring itself on a continuous basis.

But it might be more than that. What if the state is more like 'RAM', and it needs the software running on it now to keep it going. Once you unplug it the whole thing goes dead, and even when you plug it in again it stays dead. Just like a computer that only has a front panel and no bootrom. The bootstrapping is what it is all about.

A simulated brain might be fully capable of sentience but remain comatose. We'd have no way of knowing, since we do not sufficiently understand the state of comatose people as it is today. We end up feeding them intravenously for years sometimes hoping that they one day will 'wake up'.

To me this whole simulation business is just one small step on the way to 'building a brain', it may help you to get some of the details right but to boldly claim that in 10 years you will have a functioning human brain is not clever.

It makes the same mistake as the AI people in the past have made, to assume that because the first steps are easy all the steps are going to be equally easy.

As far as I am concerned this is open ended research, it may take decades, possibly centuries to achieve the last stage IF it can be done.

To put your career on the line with a hard claim like that either means that you have a crystal ball or that you are overly sure about yourself.

Scientists announce findings of fact, they do not predict the future in cases as complicated as this one.

Anyway, I'm getting seriously out of my depth here, I hope they will succeed with as many 'phases' as possible and I'm happy they have a charismatic project leader that has been able to get the funding required to do this research but I really would have been much happier if he had not named a hard date. That was an unfortunate decision.

I don't think they are dishonest or idiots at all, merely underestimating the scope of the problem.