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I may be delusional but I believe we can now build a complete, reasonably accurate facsimile of the human brain. If I'm right that means we can build an intelligence that is at least as capable of human beings in terms of its ability to interact with and perform computations similar to human beings but is also extensible allowing us to engineer artificial beings based on a silicon substrate that would be substantially more durable and computationally powerful than unaugmented human beings. I believe that all the clues are available for anyone to see. Clearly it will take substantial computational and engineering resources to deliver on the extrapolation from current technology I just made, but it implies that super-human level intelligence will scale with Moore's law and in general with respect to the law of accelerating exponential return from advanced technology.

In Issue 42 of {\it{The Wild and Crazy Guide to the Singularity}}, I mentioned we could build an AI today comparable in function to a human being. By that I mean engineers could sit down with cognitive and systems neuroscientists and figure out how to put together existing pieces of technology to produce a reasonable simulation of a human brain, I also mentioned that because of the law of accelerating returns we could extend this basic brain design by trading computational capacity and functional capability for power since we still don’t know how to achieve comparable efficiency. What's perhaps scary is that we could add as prosthetics the many powerful tools we use every day as technology for accelerating scientific progress and exploit these as add-ons to create a more powerful and capable machine than those designed by evolution and natural selection.

This claim does not imply we don't have a great deal to learn about the detailed organization, function and pathology of biological brains, crucial in diagnosing neurological disorders. Moreover, at the systems neuroscience level, advances in computer architecture and algorithm design will profit from a better understanding of the details of how biological brains work. It is also worth noting that humans encompass a huge variety of biological diversity in both form and function \emdash{} including the molecular machinery comprising our immune systems and the extensive biota that populate our bodies and considerably expand our inherent assets, most of which is more complex than what is needed in order to replicate the basic function and architecture of the human brain, but that, as long as we inhabit flesh bodies, will be essential to our health and well-being.

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