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18 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
Each time a new advance in technology is made, people use it to explain
the working of the brain. The ancient Greeks thought the brain was a
fire consuming oxygen. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the
telephone, the nervous system resembled a maze of wires and the brain
an exchange. Brains were obviously a sophisticated telephone system.
This idea has some potentially frightening consequences, particularly in
light of the speed at which computers are improving.
The most striking feature of computer technology is the rate of
development. Cars travel faster than a person’s legs will carry them,
machines manufacture things faster than our hands are capable of
working. If brains are computers, surely it is just a matter of time before
they will think faster than humans. Turing predicted this would happen
when computers reached the level of storing around 10 billion units of
information. This happened some time in mid-2000. But today, in the
year 2014, I can report that although my computer can beat me at chess,
it still cannot fill out my expense report for me. So I am still ahead!
Maybe Turing just got the mathematics wrong. The human brain
has about 10,000 times more neurons than our most powerful computers
have logic gates. By this calculation, it’s not a billion units of storage we
need but, a trillion trillion units to put the computer on a par with a
human brain. It’s just a matter of time!
The worrying thing - especially for fans of the ‘computers taking
over the world’ science fiction genre — is that computers are improving
exponentially fast in line with Moores Law, and the parity point is
coming soon. Gordon Moore founded Intel with Andy Grove, and ran
the engineering department there for more than 20 years. According
to Moore's Law, the power of a computer doubles approximately every
18 months. The next significant event in the computer versus human
competition is the gate count parity point — the moment when the
number of logic gates and the number of neurons become equal. By my
reckoning this will happen some time in 2053.
Don't despair. There may be a few dodges yet. The gate parity point
assumes a logic gate and a neuron are equally powerful. However, some
single cell organisms with only one neuron are capable of complex
behaviors, such as hunting prey and avoiding obstacles. To perform these
simple behaviors, a computer would need as many as 10,000 logic gates,
about the complexity of my TV remote control. This gives us a bit more
breathing space. The extra four orders of magnitude push the gate parity
point out to around 2080, too late for me to see, but certainly within the
bounds of some readers of this book.
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