Are computers leading us into the unknown?

Some futurists say technology is advancing so quickly it will soon change us beyond recognition. Chris Watkins reports

KEEPING up with the latest technology is becoming increasingly difficult. The PCs now hitting the shelves boast 600MHz chips - twice the speed of the dinosaur I bought last year, which replaced a truly archaic 66MHz version. I'm planning to wait another year or so before the next upgrade, until the gigahertz processors come along and consign my current model to the silicon scrapheap. There it will join the rusting bones of the first computer I ever bought, back in the early Eighties - it had 32K of RAM, no hard drive and roughly the clock speed of an abacus.

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-- SuperLuminal (prism@SpamKill.bevcomm.net), February 08, 2000

Answers

Good points Supe! And did you get a load of today's announcement by IBM:

Researchers at International Business Machines Corp. this week will show designs of computer chips that they say will be the world's fastest. IBM researchers will announce at the International Solid- State Circuits Conference that they have developed a new family of high-speed computer circuits that run at speeds of 3.3 to 4.5 gigahertz, up to five times faster than today's fastest Pentium III chips. The new design employs conventional silicon transistors, but uses only half the power of a standard high-performance chip.

-- scott (hma5_5@hotmail.com), February 08, 2000.

Also please note: the main expert quoted in this interesting article linked by Super is Vinge, whose seminal and primary writing on this subject is linked on our HMA forum a few threads below this one as:

"Machine Takeover: "soon, the human era will be ended" [the Singularity]"

-- scott (hma5_5@hotmail.com), February 08, 2000.

Good points Supe! And did you get a load of today's announcement by IBM:

I missed that one, Scott. Do you have a link?

I did notice that it looks like AMD will be producing a 1 GHz processor to compete with Intel:

AMD DEMONSTRATES 1.1GHz AMD ATHLON PROCESSOR

Gigah ertz Race Gets Crowded

-- SuperLuminal (prism@SpamKill.bevcomm.net), February 08, 2000.

Ah, never mind, I found it. :-)

IBM develops world's fastest computer circuits

-- SuperLuminal (prism@SpamKill.bevcomm.net), February 08, 2000.

It is conceivable that computers will REASON much faster than human beings, for they already do so in many ways. Calculations, playing chess etc.

What seems more unlikely is to imagine a future when computers will have intuition or ,for want of better words, a sixth sense.

While one can imagine breaking down to biets the rational aspect of the mind... it seems impossible to break down the emotional reality of the human condition, expectations, joy, fear.

Some may think that lack of emotions and intuition renders machines in a way even more superior and efficient ...however it will be precisely human intuition that will prevent a machine take-over starting to implement protective valves from the moment a first incident occurs.

We handled the mammoth, the sabretooth tiger and the bacteria...we'll be forwarned just as this thread already is forwarning us.

Clark's book 2001 illustrated this long ago.

-- Aldo (Aldo@uneco.org), February 14, 2000.