Nanotechnology And The Law of Accelerating Returns

digitect writes: "The article More More More at Reason is a good overview of the increasing rate of acceleration for technology. It includes references to nanotube technology, nanobots and estimations of gross computing power in the near and far future. Frankly, I doubt we will ever develop computers with the sophisticated power of even a mouse brain, although many may protest that we already have exceeded their gross power. I believe that things like perception and reasoning are beyond the scope of raw power. But it's a fun read anyway."

Comments

This reasoning is actually short-sighted

[coult]

This stuff sounds a lot like the science fiction of the forties and fifties..."By 1980, people will travel to their offices in automated helicopters! People will fly to the moon and mars on a regular basis!" Many science fiction novels of the time portrayed extravagant space-travel, and yet had humans doing the navigational computations on board these spacecraft, completely missing the coming dominance of electronic computers in computations. The popular imagination of future technology was simply an extrapolation of the current technology - "Fast airplanes, bigger rockets, atomic power!" - when in reality the technology of the future has turned out to be things that people could not have imagined at the time (the world-wide-web, biotechnology, fax machines, massive computational power...) In the same vein, the breakthrough technology of the next 100 years will most likely consist of things that haven't even occured to us yet -- not simply faster and faster computers, smaller and smaller robots, better and better bioengineering, but rather something else entirely.

Computing power of a brain

[Trinition]

Frankly, I doubt we will ever develop computers with the sophisticated power of even a mouse brain, although many may protest that we already have exceeded their gross power. I believe that things like perception and reasoning are beyond the scope of raw power.

Just to offer my viewpoint... The brain is slow, but massively parallel and interconnected in a vast array of various neural networks. Inherently, the brain is analog -- down to the quanta of electrons involved in the chemical reactions.

In order to simulate that in a computer that executes things very quickly, but serially, would require a HUGE AMOUNT of computing power. You'd have to be able to simulate time-slices as small as those significant in the brain.

However, if we were to take several slow processors, and network them together in parallel, we'd probbably get a lot closer for a lot less.

I don't believe consciencenous is anything special. Its just the superposition of hundreds or thousands of neural networks all owrking together. Heck, at one time, man-kind thought the motion of the planets and stars were just too complicated to ever figured out, so they were labeled as something mysterious and never to be known. We shouldn't make that same mistake with the brain and mind simple because it appears at present to be too complicated to figure out.

Re:Computing power of a brain

[SEWilco]

You're overlooking the obvious. If you want to do analog computing in silicon, you build an analog computer. Don't try to emulate analog in digital systems, instead you burn analog circuits on your wafers.

Proper design is left as an exercise for the reader.

Coincidence

[onion2k]

All this would be done automatically, effortlessly, without human hands or labor, by a fleet of tiny, invisible robots

Thats funny, thats exactly how my boss thinks work gets done too.