“The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain.” – explains Kevin Kelly in a great book, What Technology Wants (published 2010!).
This amazing statistics reminds us both that:
- We are incredibly complex creatures
- We have created with the internet a technological marvel that starts to equate the complexity of thinking people.
Now this just comes as Elon Musk the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, tweets that artificial intelligence is dangerous: “Hope we’re not just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable“.
It is quite frightening and exciting to anticipate what artificial intelligence will create. Because artificial intelligence will soon be a reality, there does not seem to be any doubt in the minds of specialists. The futurist Ray Kurzweil is quoted in the same article as declaring: “It will not be us versus the machines … but rather, we will enhance our own capacity by merging with our intelligent creations“. What will really happen? Terminator or enhancement of our capabilities? In any case, change is coming!
