We're inching closer to building an 'artificial brain' that can perform work 24/7
Or so says Neil Jacobstein, an AI expert who has consulted on projects for the U.S. military, GM, and Ford, at Exponential Finance - a two-day conference on AI and robotics sponsored by CNBC and Silicon Valley think-tank Singularity University.
"We are going to eventually understand how our brain works - we are going to reverse engineer the brain," Jacobstein, who is also co-chair of the AI and robotics track at Singularity University, said at the event.
Jacobstein said we are already making enough progress in our lifetime that we will be able to artifically replicate the neocortex - the part of mammal's brains that controls sensory perception, motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought, and language in humans, according to Science Daily.
And Jacobstein said he doesn't think it will stop there.
"And we'll even be able to replicate and accelerate other parts of the brain as well, like the hippocampus," Jacobstein told Tech Insider after his presentation. "We will eventually build artificial brains that are bigger and faster than our own, and will be connected to our own in a lot of ways, like mobile technology."
The hippocampus is thought to be the center of emotion and memory.
Once there's an artificial brain, we'll be able to access it through means like mobile technology, giving us access to a "partner who can work seven days-a-week, 24 hours-a-day," he said.
But the creation of artificial brains will even progress to the point where it's integrated with our bodies, Jacobstein said.
His remarks sound similar to what Elon Musk said at Vox Media's Code Conference last week.
Musk mentioned a new technology he said companies should be working on called "neural lace," which would add a digital layer of intelligence to our brains. It's a concept nanotechnologists have been working on, Business Insider's Jillian D'Onfro pointed out.
Jacobstein said creating a neural lace like Musk described is "doable."
"It'll start out being enhancement for the elite, but like cell phones it'll eventually democratize in price so that people who want to be augmented will have access to that technology," he told Tech Insider.