9th Dec 2020
On reading the Stephen Hawking book "Answers To The Big Questions" (see "Books That Rewired My Brain"), it made me realise just how FAR the human race has come - in many ways - just in my own lifetime, some 80-odd years.
I distinctly remember when I first heard about transistors. It was one morning in 1955, in my first year apprenticeship with the Railways at their Islington workshops. One of my mates - going for a bit of oneupmanship - asked me if I'd heard about these new things called transistors, about half the size of a jelly bean with three wires hanging out of it and was replacing all the old vacuum tube radio valves. It was like some quantum leap, one that left me way behind as I'd never even got the hang of what they were replacing. But I was seriously impressed.Then, in the mid 1980s, I stepped into the world of the computer chip, began a mid-late life love affair with personal computers and the world they were reinventing. The first one we had at work had no hard drive, simply a "floppy disc" storage device that today would store about 20% of one black and white digitised photo. But we thought it was sensational.
Ten minutes ago I looked up the current equivalent of the transistor on the web (which knows EVERYthing you can possibly ask!) and they tell me that the modern chip, that's just the one chip, contains up to 60 billion transistors! I'm sitting here looking at the end result of all this and I still can not get my head around all this nano-stuff. It's too small to be imagined. Like the way Stephen Hawking's universe is too big to be imagined. Human knowledge and understanding of all this simply can NOT be fitted into one head. Not mine anyway. But my dear lord I'm so grateful to have been along for this ride, as subatomic technology has helped me to discover a world that didn't exist when I was 10.
And this brings me to A.I. - Artificial Intelligence.
Stephen has a lot to say about what the development of A.I. could do for the human race - good and bad - as the nano world gets more and more nano and billions more bits can be crowded onto smaller and smaller spaces and the resulting processing capacity starts to exceed the human brain. Especially the ever-growing tendency towards giving computers a built-in ability to "learn". Independent of us that is. It's a sobering chapter! And I loved the little piece he includes....
Why are we so worried about Artificial Intelligence?
Surely humans will always be able to pull the plug.
People asked a computer - "Is there a God?" -
and the computer said - "There is now!" - and fused the plug.
....ah, black humour! Well, I hope that's what it is. Not that it'll bother me much, but you have to worry a bit about how the grandkids will get on. If I've seen this amount of change in my 80 years, can you imagine what they'll see. But how I wish I could be here to see it with them.
Cheers....
T.R.E.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>