Back in the 1980s Hans Morovec estimated that the computing power of a human brain is about 100 TeraFlops. That is about 100 trillion floating point instructions per second. We use flops, which are floating point calculations, because they are a complex instruction. Many instructions such as add 1 to an integer execute extremely fast. A flop is a tough thing for a computer to do so it is used a benchmark for difficult calculating.

Other researchers have estimated the human brain’s computing power 1,000 times higher at 100 PetaFlops, which is 100,000 trillion flops.

In either case, super computers are approaching the computational power of the human brain. This is not to say that computers have been programmed to do human type thinking. Currently, super computers are being used for arithmetic. They crunch large numbers of values through difficult calculations. This is good for predicting weather, but has nothing to do with what a human brain does. In fact, human brains are particularly bad at arithmetic.

Sooner or later some clever programmer is going to take a human brain simulation and run it on one of these super beasts and get human-like thought.

The Singularity is the date when information hits the fan. It is when the trend lines go vertical and all change happens so fast that we can’t predict what happens afterwards. The earliest predicted date that I can find for the singularity is December 21, 2012, which is a calculated date from some outlaw programmers tweaking trend charts. I like to think the singularity happens on the day that a computer simulation of the human brain wakes up. It is the day that a computer is as smart or smarter than a human and knows it.

Most people don’t believe that this will happen, but I am certain that it will happen in the next 50 years, and it will be sooner rather than later. My own feel is that it will happen before my 70th birthday in 2021. I think a date like 2012 might be early, but I have a gut feeling that 30 years from now we will look back and identify the date as 2014. This is just a feeling.

The singularity is coming soon! Get your head together.