Artificial Brains - When will it happen?

I just had to start blogging. An article surfaced in the Financial Times today with a string of futuristic predictions that are optimistic, ending with a prediction that is worth noting.

In Futurephile: Computers to be 'aware, Joia Shillingford says

What will happen in 2050 and beyond? By 2050, there will be computers that have the processing power of all human brains on earth. That's a lot of brains working on a lot of problems.

Could Joia be a bit optimistic? We have been working on this prediction for several years (see an early publication of ours addressing this question.) The scale of a brain, the complexity of the dendritic arbor in cortical neurons, the connectivity in the cortex, the elegant folded spherical shape that minimizes delays, and the plasticity (changeability) of the neurons all must be captured. Our BioRC Biomimetic Real-Time Cortex project is all about this. We believe a synthetic cortex (a single one) might be possible in 2050, similar in scale and complexity to the LHC project. We are skeptical about such cortices populating the planet in the billions by that time.

Despite my pessimism about an entire synthetic cortex, progress will be accelerated by the visionary DARPA SyNAPSE program set to launch soon.