Can technology replace the human brain?
I have been told hundreds, maybe thousands of times, that nobody is indispensable.
Is this how it will always be?
Will computers and robots become the rulers of the universe?
If so, how will we cope? We know that our lives have to a certain extent been taken over by interactive technology.
I believe that children are already suffering because they are not given the opportunity to use their God given skills to do the things such as mathematics and spelling which in our school days were integral parts of the curriculum.
Surely, the less they are required to use their brains, the lazier they become. Science and Technology are wonderful commodities, but to my way of thinking, there is no substitute for tender loving care provided by doctors, nurses and social workers.
Even now, files appertaining to patients are all neatly tucked away inside computers.
How many times have you had to telephone your GP's surgery for an appointment, and heard the click click of a keyboard in the background. How well trained are the receptionists to handle the computers? I鈥檝e heard it said so often, 鈥淚鈥檓 sorry, but I can鈥檛 find your records in the system鈥.
To me, it appears that the personal contact between doctor and patient is sadly lacking. So, at least in my lifetime, I hope technology will play it鈥檚 part, but only as a humble assistant to the wellbeing of the human race.
People
technology just can't replace the human brain?'
period
Well I've been told hundreds and thousands of times that no one is dispensable, that we are all in fact indispensable in the great cosmic soup of life. And this is how it has always been!
I guess it depends who you listen to and if you are an optimist or pessimist?
No one as yet has built a machine anywhere near as amazing and intricate as the human one and for my money no one will ever either.
but that won't stop them trying. The cloning debate sometimes makes me laugh. Why because scientific man (and it is usually man rather than woman) thinks in such simplistic terms and believes that they are or eventually will be capable of successfully reproducing human kind.
Their passion and zeal is such that they of course miss the complexity of it all - in fact haven't got time to consider it even. One of them of course wants to be the first. Like the builders and climbers of the tower of babel - they wanted to get to God first and toppled in the process.
I'm sure in the great cosmic laboratory there is a way to clone (such a distasteful word don't you think) but man will make many stuff ups along the way and may never get there his own way.
But yes I agree Margo - technology can be fun and can save time and can make our lives easier at times but we need to remain the master or mistress of our own destiny and always control the machines.
having said that I don't believe that machines will ever be able to control humans - but we may get lazy and permit them to do things for us that we can easily do ourselves.
the film AI - artificial intelligence was a great film related to this topic - well worth a look to see how cloning can all go wrong!
perhaps Spielberg was warning us in his own subtle way!
just came across this advertising splerb:
the next generation will stroll through the world's great museums while walking down the street, find and download songs in seconds at the simple touch of a button, instantly have a map on their mobile that tells them how to get from where they are going to where they want to be (assuming they ever know where that is! - my comments)
The next generation will watch TV shows and view bus and train timetables with one touch of their mobile. The next generation will connect wirelessly to the internet at broadband speeds, from most place across the globe.
Anything tghey want will be just one click away (what love too?) they will do more things in more places than all previous generations combined and once they experience all this they will never understand how we did things before and you can be part of it all
( what utter hogs wash!)
To a certain extent i disagree with your view about technology today. You say how
"children are already suffering because they are not given the opportunity to use their God given skills to do the things such as mathematics and spelling"
but how can this be true when teachers now are more encouraging than ever. Just becuase they no longer 'cane' kids into learning does not mean that children are no longer
"required to use their brains"
Do you honestly think that children now sit in schools with a calculator in one hand and a spell checker in the other?
It is ridiculous to think that technology can replace human brains.
I have yet to come across anyone or anything that is not indispensable.
You hear people say I could not live without it, but they lived without it before they acquired it.
Robots will never supersede humans although they may come close.
I read lately that in the not too distant future robots will be performing every task no matter how big or menial that humans are involved in at present. But I doubt very much there will ever be a robotic brain to match the human version.
Robotics is still in the state of evolving but so is the human brain.
Without having the precise figure humans have used only a very minute part of the brain in reaching the stage we are at now.
Robots today can only perform because they are programmed by humans; however an interesting thought comes to mind 鈥 human brain transplants into robots 鈥 scary. We could end up working for them, an interesting thought nevertheless.
We would be foolish to ignore the very real possibility that artificial intelligence will one day (quite soon) be greater than our own. In historical terms advances in computer power have "evolved" at an astonishing rate and there is no reason to believe that it wont continue.
While we (and Gary Kasparov) debate whether Deep Blue "actually" exhibits anything we would call intelligence, it can clearly outplay any human adversary in its narrow field of chess, so the debate is pretty moot.
It is calculated that in less than ten years we will have computers with the same processing power as the human brain. I don't imagine computers will be intelligent in the same way as humans are and we may have a few evolutionary tricks up our sleeves that will enable us to control computer for a few decades, but eventually they will take control, and its impossible to predict what this would mean for humanity.
some years ago I was sitting in a high school (ages 14-18 -- I wish someone would explain to me the English School levels so I could communicate better) teacher's lounge in Mill Valley, California during lunch.
An old Algebra teacher says:
"So, I'm dragging this kid through an equation, something about years, and I ask him, 'what's 365 divided by 12?' He whips out his calculator, punches it in, and says, '4380'. I say, 'there's about 4380 days in a month?' He shrugs. See, that's what's wrong. They punch in the numbers, think that the calculator will always tell the truth." --And I remember that I used to do that with a pencil and paper when I was in Algebra during the 60's.
About an hour later, I walk into a classroom where a student is doing a presentation on World War One. He's pulling up a Power Point and reading, "The Maxim gun was responsible for more deaths than any other weapon in the trenches." I raise my hand. "What's a Maxim gun?" I ask. "I don't know," he says.
That Friday I'm supervising an after-school car wash to benefit the school (American) football team. A student is washing his uncle's 1965 Ford Mustang. His uncle isn't there, and I'm off doing something else. He decides to do the uncle a favor by spraying off the engine. Two hours, a roll of paper towels, and a hair dryer later, the car starts.
Last week, I was working on a complicated computing project having to do with system diagnostics. We were in a conference room, our machines linked with other machines around the world, and talking about self-healing systems -- a topic which scares everybody in the room, and there are some heavy hitters in there. Then, of course, the lights go out. Seems that some guy three miles away with a backhoe (don't know your word for it) had inadvertently dug through enough enough lines to put about 10,000 people out of service. When we came back online, our systems were toast.
So I'm thinking:
1. It seems that our technology never quite exceeds our inability to use it.
2. Our greatest disadvantage is our ignorance of scale, and the interrelationships between things.
Given these, I don't think we are able as humans to create a technological environment with the ability to control us unless we can first understand the nature of that control. But I do think we can create a technological environment that can destroy us.
(and yeah, I'm really aware of the political metaphor in there)
(and yeah, I'm breathing a little easier after the midterm election on Tuesday...)
Scary.
==Will Davis
Palo Alto, California