Not a neuroscientist (never thought I'd use NANS), and this may well be the boondoggle of a charismatic man who's using it to buy yachts and laugh at the EU. T

Not a neuroscientist (never thought I'd use NANS), and this may well be the boondoggle of a charismatic man who's using it to buy yachts and laugh at the EU. That said, the one benefit I could see is that it's a billion+ motivation for folks to think about a hard problem. They likely won't accomplish a 100 billion neuron sim, but 100's to 1000's of people will hopefully be thinking about that goal, trying to decompose it, and producing useful sub-advances. Maybe like the HGP or the LHC or space flight, intense money will lead to enabling technologies that accelerate what is possible. The other problem is that humans are horrible at predicting scientific progress, even in fields they are comfortable / experts in. Edge scientists may actually suffer from this the worst. So much of life has been devoted to becoming an expert in the field that it becomes more challenging to consider large changes. Even while most major breakthroughs are built from analogies to other fields, and more "simple" every day phenomena. Ex: Relativity, one of the weirdest advances ever, came from thought about trains. Maybe a billion+ could be spent more wisely, but at least they're spending it. These are the same folks who decry our governments whenever they reduce funding and malign the sciences. Stop complaining and find a way to write the grant, or meet the right folks, or whatever's necessary so you can be a part of the money train and get something useful done.