You are either in one of three buckets when you read the title of this post. You’re intrigued because you find the idea of artificial intelligence interesting and you believe that one day we’ll be able to create robots that can actually think. Or maybe your frightened because you think if computers get too smart they will take over the world and exterminate human beings. Or maybe you just think I’m crazy. In any case let me explain what I mean.
I believe the human mind is just like a computer processor except that it’s entirely organic and is far more evolved. Whether you agree with this or not, most people would say the human mind is exponentially more intelligent than even the most sophisticated computer processor. Ironically I think the human mind is inferior to the computer processor in some ways. When it comes to processing our waking thought, human beings actually move at snail’s pace relative to a computer processor. Think about it. When presented with a mathematical problem it takes noticeable time to process and come up with an answer. Whereas presented similar questions, a computer processor can calculate the answer nearly instantaneously. Even a $1.99 calculator demonstrates this power, but computers can only do this in a binary fashion. By this I mean they cannot make “reasonable decisions” based on inputs, they can only process ones and zeroes to get to a binary decision; essentially answering yes or no based on rules. There is no wavering from that. That’s the goal of artificial intelligence, to take a binary decision and empower the processor to do some reasoning. So the processor is faster, but the human mind is much more dynamic and sophisticated.
Ok, so how the heck are they intersecting. Well, like this. As computers get smarter and we figure out how to enable them to learn and reason they will start to get closer to the capabilities of the human mind. Of course you need to take a leap of faith that this is even possible, but who would have thought we could build airplanes and travel to the moon a thousand years ago. The mind on the other hand is getting faster. I always loved the old wives tale about how we only use 10% of brains. Well this has largely been disproved, but I like to think that the truth is we use our brains only 5% at the potential efficiency level. That means we can become exponentially more efficient, that’s processing. So as the human mind begins to process information faster and the computer starts to reason and think through problems they two technologies start to intersect.
Ok, now take this in. As this starts to occur I believe that at one instant in time, just like the ping pong ball experiment that demonstrates a nuclear reaction, the human mind and the computer processor will become one; literally one living, breathing, organic and man-made being. Humans will not be taken over by computers, they will become them and vice versa, computers won’t become the rulers of the universe they will evolve into them. It’s out there, and maybe I can’t fully explain it, but I just believe it. That’s what this blog is about so it doesn’t matter how out there it is.
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