Understanding an AI's Timescale 189
An anonymous reader writes "It's a common trope in sci-fi that when AIs become complex enough to have some form of consciousness, humans will be able to communicate with them through speech. But the rate at which we transmit and analyze data is infinitesimal compared to how fast a computer can do it. Would they even want to bother? Jeff Atwood takes a look at how a computer's timescale breaks down, and relates it to human timeframes. It's interesting to note the huge variance in latency. If we consider one CPU cycle to take 1 second, then a sending a ping across the U.S. would take the equivalent of 4 years. A simple conversation could take the equivalent of thousands of years. Would any consciousness be able to deal with such a relative delay?"
Sci-fi story (Score:5, Informative)
Brains versus CPUs (Score:4, Informative)
This article at Science Daily is helpful in understanding the issue: http://www.sciencedaily.com/re... [sciencedaily.com]
Comparing CPUs and brains is like comparing apples to planets: Granted, both are somewhat round but that's pretty much the end of any useful comparison.
Note that I don't agree that CPU-based computers can't be made to be intelligent, but I do think such intelligence will be significantly different.
Re:Will computers ever be as smart as us? Briefly. (Score:5, Informative)
Neurons aren't even within several orders of magnitude as fast as transistors: linky1 [stanford.edu] and linky2 [technologyreview.com].
However, a single typical neuron does a lot more work than a single transistor, computationally speaking.