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| "Tanging Ngiti", from Pinto Art Gallery, Antipolo City, Rizal |
Two things: faster brains and more sophisticated thought processes. All artificial, all human engineered.
Ergo, hardware + software = awareness? Anytime soon? Maybe. Because of our longer lifespans, maybe even within our lifetime.
Faster Brains
"Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.
True? True.
So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties." (Time)
By 2045, the article claims, man can become immortal. By hooking up to a computer and downloading his consciousness into its chips and wires a person will have a more durable home. His will and intellect will permanently reside in a less organic and, maybe, less destructible vessel made of ceramics, plastics, silicon and other metals.
They call the event Singularity. It's the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. And I thought the Fringe series is still sci-fi by most standards in circa 2011.
Complex Thinking
"Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, has written that there are at least a trillion Web pages in existence, which means the internet's collective brain has more neurons than our actual gray matter that's stuffed between our ears.
'The Web holds about a trillion pages. The human brain holds about 100 billion neurons,' Kelly writes in his 2010 book "What Technology Want".
Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page on average links to 60 other pages. That adds up to a trillion 'synapses' between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number of links -- but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The global machine is." (CNN)
Awareness
There is already an interconnection, an infrastructure which is getting more integrated and sophisticated. If somebody can hook up to a machine and then gain access and control of this superhighway.... If people hook up and become linked.... will consciousnesses coalesce into a collective mind?
Will the World Wide Web wake up (W x 5!)?
2045, is it? I wonder what seed of human genius will spark this.
That will make humans the likely ancestors of the Borg. At least, until we actually come in contact with other extraterrestrial civilizations, including Borg-like creatures. Meanwhile, back to earth: I hope cybernetic implants are covered by our senior citizen privileges.
