Silicon Graphics has released a desktop workstation that qualifies as a super computer. My guess that it can be configured at about 50 teraflops. (A teraflop is a trillion floating point arithmetic operations per second.)
Hans Moravec estimated the computing power of the human brain at 100 teraflops, although some other researches have placed it out at 1,000 times higher. Regardless, we are in the right neighborhood if a desktop computer can even approach the speed of a human brain.
The human brain, in addition to the computing power of billions of neurons, has some fancy programming going on that will not be accurately simulated for a while. The fact that we are creating computers now which are nearly as powerful as a human brain does not mean that anyone has been able to make a computer that thinks like a human. That is ways off (not too far, though).
If trends hold then the computers should continue to increase in capacity and power exponentially, doubling every 18 months. There are some physical limits to the current technologies, but that doesn’t mean that new technologies will not appear to keep the growth on track.
In 2015, then, desktop computers should be at least 16 times more powerful than they are now. Super computers which are a few orders of magnitude more powerful than this desktop, will have the capacity a dozen human brains. Within our lifetimes there will be cheap computers that are smarter than ourselves living in our cell phones.
What will happen, and I am sure of this, some clever programming will result in a human equivalent intelligence program that will be several thousand times smarter than the smartest human who ever lived. There will be lots of these computers working on the difficult unanswered questions of our time. They will solve health issues for us resulting in very long lives. We will get free energy and perhaps even the ability to travel to the stars.
It all starts around 2015, but may be as late as 2025.
Until then, be nice to your computer.
One Comment
hmmm – whenever I see something like this, my thoughts immediately turn to how vulnerable interconnectivity makes everything.
and then I think things like – just gotta make it to 2045….