I don't know if it's so much that neuroscience needs AI to understand the brain or not. I mean, maybe. I'm not exactly an expert on either, but I know more about AI than I do neuroscience. But my take has always been more in line with what somebody else said about how "in order to learn to fly, we didn't build a bird".
To me, that gets to the core issue. In order to build "artificial intelligence", we don't necessarily have to build something that works exactly like the human brain does. I mean, it's called artificial intelligence for a reason.
That's certainly not to say that studying the brain is worthless. Far from it. But I do tend to think that a better approach to building an AI is to just focus on building something that displays intelligence (however you want to define that) without worrying about whether or not it is essentially a human brain replicated in silicon.
I don't know if it's so much that neuroscience needs AI to understand the brain or not. I mean, maybe. I'm not exactly an expert on either, but I know more about AI than I do neuroscience. But my take has always been more in line with what somebody else said about how "in order to learn to fly, we didn't build a bird".
To me, that gets to the core issue. In order to build "artificial intelligence", we don't necessarily have to build something that works exactly like the human brain does. I mean, it's called artificial intelligence for a reason.
That's certainly not to say that studying the brain is worthless. Far from it. But I do tend to think that a better approach to building an AI is to just focus on building something that displays intelligence (however you want to define that) without worrying about whether or not it is essentially a human brain replicated in silicon.