--- The Fool wrote: > Fascinating article on human / computer processing > tasks: > http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/start.html?pg=2
This reminds me of a short story I read (can't remember the author at the moment - Him?) in which computers (or maybe it was cyborgs?) get all the interesting jobs because they are superior to plain humans...until it's discovered that only humans can survive the experimental interstellar drive... Or something like that. I think that prolonged/intimate dealings with living beings will require living beings; we have all evolutionary history behind us when it comes not only to simple visual recognition, but also threat assessment, curiosity, cooperation/friendship and of course a sense of humor. Cybernetic augmentation will probably happen sometime (soon?), and researchers are working on bionics/smart prosthetics, some of which will certainly be in use in the next decade or two, but those won't alter our essential emotional core (aka 'lizard and rat' parts of the brain). Duplicating or surpassing the intricate connections of the human neocortex will be far more difficult, IMHO. (I sort of have to believe that, don't I? ;)) The human brain contains roughly 100 billion cells, each with ~1-10 thousand connections, resulting in about 10-to-the-14th-or-15th total connections. Even though a neuron is slower than a computer transistor by a large factor (10-to-the-6th), the massive parallel processing capacity of the brain enables it to respond very quickly (according to the following link, for example, our brain takes only 100-200 msec to recognize a face in a photograph). http://www-gpi.physik.uni-karlsruhe.de/pub/robert/Diplom/node5.html [Links from the above page go to discussions of artificial neurons and neural net etc. -- but I honestly don't know anything about the author. Not my baliwick.] I'm not ready to take second-class status to a computer (even though I know our technology is quite dependent on them). :P Pinnacle of Creation Maru __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
