Will technology take over the world?
After watching movies like The Terminator and IRobot, does it make you wonder if these events could really happen? Could technology become smart enough to rebel against the people that created it? People may have very differing opinions on this, and there are different reasons as to why this could and could not happen.
Technology is advancing at an extremely alarming rate. Think about the £1000 desktop you would have bought 10 years compared to the £500 tablet you could buy today. Moore’s law claims that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years – this relates to processors, memory and even the amount of megapixels in a camera. A modern computer build around 30 years ago would have been the size of a house! Now you can buy devices as small as smartphones which have more processing power than a desktop computer 10 years ago! This shows that technology is advancing at a very fast rate, allowing smarter devices to be created.
So how does this link to technology taking over the world? The paragraph above only describes the modern components used in all devices. A computer is just a device designed to process data and nothing else. The reason that technology continues to advance is because it makes things easier to do. It makes businesses more efficient with new software that carries out useful and automated tasks, and it continues to make life easier and easier for humans. However, smarter processes similar to the human brain are currently being researched and some prototypes have even been created. IBM has developed a processor that has come closer than ever to replicating the human brain. The processor is capable of "rewiring" its connections as it encounters new information. Researchers believe that by replicating that feature, the technology could start to learn. IBM explained that they were trying to recreate aspects of the mind such as emotion, perception, sensation and cognition by "reverse engineering the brain." Could this be the start of a new revolution? Could IBM be the equivalent of Skynet in The Terminator? At the speed technology is advancing, this processor could continue to improve and become even smarter, potentially leading to new products being created. These products may not only data processing devices like today’s products, but smarter products with emotions, feelings and sensation. This raises the question, could technology one day become so smart that it rebels against man? This may seem like an unrealistic possibility, but at the same time, technology is becoming very smart! I think that if technology does continue to evolve at this rate, and processors do become more than just data processors, it may just happen. What do you think?
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The idea that computers could begin to outsmart humans, and may not be benevolent in their actions, can be an incredibly frightening idea. Just this week MIT made public their so-called "Brain Chip" mimicking our synapses better than ever, now completely homogeneous with our own analogue form (rather than the traditional digital on-off of similar designs). MIT is so confident in their new design that they believe that their chips not only reduce the time existing models take from hours or days to more manageable timeframes, but are in fact are now faster than the biological processes in our own cranium!
ReplyDeleteJust think, that in theory it is now possible to build an essentially human mind which can process information faster than the real thing. Computers thinking like people - honestly, it's the last thing I want. We all know far to well that human beings find it all to easy to exterminate each-other for the strangest reasons and rationalise it away. Would love to chat further, but got to run: I'm off to build my bunker.
MIT's Brain Chip: http://www.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/brain-chip-1115.html