Zuckerberg, Musk, and Thiel Launch “HIM”

April 1, 2014
The Bot and I at MIT

A Him And A He At  MIT

HIM” is backed by capital from the  founders of PayPal, Facebook, and Tesla. Him is known as “Vicarious”.

According to the Vicarious Company,  Vicarious will be a “machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain. Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network.”

Some of Silicon Valley’s most influential billionaires are backing Vicarious which aims to recreate the human neocortex as computer code.  Peter Thiel, from PayPal, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, and Elon Musk from Tesla are all in the creation game.  The young men have thrown $40 million in capital to HIM,  according to the Wall Street Journal. 

The neocortex is the outer layer of the cerebral hemispheres and in humans is crucial to the use of the senses as well as activities such as language, motor commands and spatial reasoning.

The  Vicarious Company has already managed to create software that will solve Captcha, the online tests used by many websites to supposedly identify humans from computers. Vicarious  founder Scott Phoenix said that if they are successful, Vicarious will have created “a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn’t need to eat or sleep”.

By the definition from Mirriam-Webster, Vicarious is  experienced or felt by watching, hearing about, or reading about someone else rather than by doing something yourself. Just another giant leap , not for mankind, but for HIM.