Building synthetic brains capable of human level discovery and invention...

Summary - Although the World Brain is not yet a reality, it is a long range goal of IEI to create a free-thinking entity, distributed across the Internet, that introspects upon human-originated content and then creates its own seminal thought and discoveries. For those of you who have read and understood IEI's web pages, you will likely realize that there is no other form of artificial intelligence capable of self-learning and creativity that can compare with IEI's patented technologies. Therefore, it is our ambition to perfect the network (i.e., WAN) mechanics for distributing its neural systems across the largest computational platform currently available, the Internet, and allowing them to knit themselves into a coherent brain using IEI's Supernet principles. If you are an investor, government, or corporation interested in supporting this effort, please contact Dr. Stephen Thaler at Imagination Engines, Incorporated.

Details - One of IEI's main themes is that it is single-handedly building the required artificial intelligence technology to emulate and perhaps exceed the capabilities of the human brain. Thus all of the key cortical functions recognized by brain scientists, perception, learning, and internal imagery (a.k.a., imagination) have been developed at the IEI laboratory purely using artificial neural networks to emulate the biological neural networks of the human brain.

Of course the effectiveness of a system that integrates all of the IEI technologies into a creative synthetic intellect will be dependent upon the quality and the scale of the hardware used to implement our technology. Looking around, the largest computational platform now available to perform the necessary parallel processing is the Internet. That is why some of the most ambitious computational tasks of our time have been undertaken using distributed computing techniques, as exemplified in the SETI screen saver project. Note however, that the SETI program is not a neural system. It is simply a scheme to divide an ambitious computational task among many scattered machines, via the Internet. 

Therefore, IEI is busily transforming all of its advanced neural network paradigms into TCP/IP based systems. The overall intent is to convert many, if not all, of the TCP/IP nodes on the Internet into functioning neurons. The resulting freethinking entity will be capable of introspecting upon all human-originated content residing on the Internet and World Wide Web, and from that knowledge store creating new ideas and strategies that will inevitably transform our thinking and our planet. As this World Brain accumulates new knowledge, it will begin to create a "SuperNet" above the Internet, vastly overshadowing the present content stored there.

This coming World Brain will not be accessed via search engines. We will simply ask it to introspect on the information we, as humans, seek.