I was reading Michael Crichtons ''the terminal man'' and knowing how he likes to link fact in with his fiction i was wondering if there was really a dreaded watershed week for scientists when ''the information handling capacity of all the computers in the world first exceeded the information handling capacity of all the human brains in the world''??
Was there really a watershed week in 1969, when computers became more powerful than man?norton
No, i disagree. computers can only handle binary data, as far as i am aware. they cannot handle emotions. so how can you say that computers exceed the information handling capacity of all the human brains in the world?
what about the information capacity required in storing emotion?
Was there really a watershed week in 1969, when computers became more powerful than man?spyware remover
I'm not sure about information handling, but when the IBM computer ''Deep Blue'' beat Gary Kasparov at chess, I felt that a barrier had definately been crossed.
There's more to power than information handling capacity. My PC can probably handle more bytes of info than I can; but I can switch it off.
Why certainly.
No effect at all
Like the book ''1984'' we'll see it over the next decade
In 1969 it would have taken a thousand square feet to house the computing power you keep on your desktop. For goodness sakes, the atomic bomb was designed by scientists using slide rules, no computational assistance othr than that.
Modern computers can store an unprecedented amount of information. The difference between brains and computers is that people's brains are capable of connecting seemingly unrelated nuggets of information to produce new concepts.
We call this ''creative thought'', or ''synthesis'', and no matter how many facts we cram into a computer, it can never generate an independent idea.
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