Computer Hysteria: The Brain
by Berry F. Phillips March 2006
It
was dark one Saturday afternoon in my youth. I was mesmerized by the scene
on the large silver screen of our local movie theater. The scene was a
laboratory of a diabolical mad scientist that had acquired a fresh human
brain for experimentation. The brain portrayed in living color was
suspended in a green luminous liquid that was glowing and bubbling. The
evil scientist had attached wires to various parts of the brain so it
could function as man and machine!
Years later while surfing on the Internet, I read an interview conducted
by Business Week with Raymond C. Kurzweil, a MIT graduate and a founder of
six companies that have pioneered applications of artificial intelligence
in medicine, speech recognition, and reading machines for the blind. His
books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, and the Age of Spiritual
Machines. Upon completion of his book, When Computers Exceed Human
Intelligence, he gave an interview addressing the question, "Do you have
any doubts that a superior intelligence will emerge in the next few
decades?"
"No. It's inevitable. For example nanotubes would allow computing at the
molecular level. A one-inch cube of nanotube circuitry would be about a
billion times more powerful than the human brain, in terms of computing
capacity. That raw computing capacity is a necessary but not sufficient
condition to achieve human-level intelligence in a machine. We also need
the organization and the software to organize those resources. There are a
number of scenarios for achieving that. The most compelling is
reverse-engineering the human brain. We're already well down that path,
with techniques like MRI. But we'll do better because the speed and the
resolution¬¬¬--the bandwidth--with which we can scan the brain are also
accelerating exponentially.
One means of scanning the brain would be to send small scanners in the
form of nanobots into the blood stream. Millions of them would go through
every capillary of the brain. We already have electronic means for
scanning neurons and neurotransmitter concentrations that are nearby and
within 30 years, we'll have these little nanobots that can communicate
with each other wirelessly. They could create an enormous database with
every nueuron, every synaptic connection, every neurotransmitter
concentration--a precise map of the human brain. So, we'll have the
templates for human intelligence.
Once we can embody human thought processes in a non biological medium, it
will necessarily soar past human intelligence for several reasons. First,
machines can share their knowledge electronically. With humans, you spend
years teaching language to each child. [But] once any one machine has
mastered something, it can share that knowledge instantly with millions of
other machines over the global wireless Web, which we'll have by then. So
a machine can become expert at any number of disciplines.
Secondly, machines are far faster, and machine memories can be far larger
and much more accurate. However, machines do not yet have the depth of
pattern recognition or the subtlety of human intelligence. They can't deal
with emotions and humor and other subtle qualities of human intelligence.
Once their complexity matches that of humans and they are able to master
the skills at which humans now excel, and those abilities are combined
with the ways in which machines are already superior--that will be a very
formidable combination. It'll get to the point where the next generation
of technology can only be designed by the machines themselves.
Finally, while the complexity of the biological computational circuitry in
humans is essentially fixed, the density of machine circuitry will grow
exponentially. By 2030, a $1,000 computer system will have the power of
1,000 human brains, by 2050, a billion human brains."
Welcome to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World!
Berry Phillips is a member of the CCOKC and a regular writer for the CCOKC website and the eMonitor