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IBM Eyes Brain-Like Computing
schliz writes "IBM's research director John E Kelly III has delivered an academic lecture in Australia, outlining its 'cognitive computing' aims and efforts as the 70-year 'programmable computing' era comes to a close. He spoke about Watson — the 'glimpse' of cognitive computing that beat humans at Jeopardy! in Feb — and efforts to mimic biological neurons and synapses on 'multi-state' chips. Computers that function like brains, he said, are needed to make sense of exascale data centers of the future."
Oh come on. lets be fair. If it turns psycho, it has a 25% chance of it becoming a CEO. Either way, they sure as shit know how to make a lot of people a ton of money. Isn't that what we hire CEO's for? Even the psycho ones?
Speak for yourself.
This is kind of off topic, but this reminds me of an article I read (maybe in time magazine) that was about how in the next 40 years or so we will have computers powerful enough to emulate a human brain. The point of the article was that once we reach that capability, humans will basically become immortal because we would just copy our brains onto a computer and not have to worry about our fragile organic bodies failing on us.
It's very interesting to think about all the effects a breakthrough like that would have on humanity, but I also wonder if something like that is even possible. Just because we can emulate the human brain doesn't mean we can transfer information off of our current brains. Even if we can transfer the information, will our consciousness with a computer brain be the same as our consciousness with an organic brain or will we experience the world completely different than we do now? Once we have eternal life as computers do we even bother reproducing anymore? If our only existence becomes as pieces of data in a computer are we even humans at that point? And is the real way humans wind up going extinct just the result of a power outage at the datacenter where we keep our brains?
Like I said, this was pretty off topic. But the title reminded me of that article I read. This might be it, I'm not sure though.
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
The Singularity is Near - Raymond Kurzweil
Floating point exception.
Core dumped.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.