The Coming Age Of A.i.: Understanding Cognition

[final kaoss]

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The fastest computer in the world, NEC Earth Simulator, is currently located in Japan; it is capable of performing around 36 Trillion Operations per second at peak capacity. That is still only a fraction of the capability of the human brain, however time and the advance of technology does not remain stagnant. If you know anything about computers or read articles on the internet in technology news sections and message forums, you may have heard of a frequently referred to term called, "Moore's Law." Moore's law states that for every 18 months of time, the power of microprocessors doubles. This is most easily observed if you just reflect on the speed of your first computer compared to the one you currently own. I have a personal example. In late 1997 I owned a PC with a 233 MHz processor, 6 GB Hard Drive, and 64 MB of RAM. I spent about $1,500 on this computer. In late 2002 I bought the parts and assembled a computer myself, the one I am using currently. This computer has a 2,530 MHz Processor, 200 GB Hard Drive capacity, and 1 GB of RAM. I obtained the parts for around $1,300, taking into consideration that I added unnecessary cosmetic upgrades like colored lights and cooling fans and a svelte black and gold Plexiglas case. During those 5 Years my old computer's total capacity and level of efficiency was dwarfed by a scale factor of around 10 times. Currently, as I am writing this article in mid 2003, personal computer microprocessors from Intel clock in at about 3,066 MHz. See where this is going?

Let us assume that we use the timescale of today and say that NEC's Earth Simulator is the fastest computer on Earth in 2003. Using Moore's law, which is has proven entirely true since he first mentioned over two decades ago it is possible to give a good guess at where computational capacity be in the future. For example in 2005 there should be a supercomputer capable of around 70 TeraFLOPS. (1 Teraflop is saying 1,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second) Mid to late 2006 a computer may appear with 140 TeraFLOPS, 2008 - 300 TFLOPS, 2010 - 550 TFLOPS, 2012 - 1200 TFLOPS (1.2 PetaFLOPS), around 2020, there will be a computer that performs 10,000 TeraFLOPS, or somewhere in the neighborhood of the human brain. If you project the development of computers over time you should arrive at the intersection point where computers and the human brain have equal efficiency and capacity and at this intersection point it's a safe determination that self aware artificial life will be created. This of course is just talking about one specific computer arrangement or supercomputer, rather than a concept like "Matrix computing" or "Cell Computing" This would allow the same calculations per second only spread out between millions of smaller computers. Right now, if all the home PC's on the planet could work together sharing processing power, they could probably reach the levels of computation I was talking about in the future, however PC's are used for other tasks but there are pieces of software like Seti@Home that work on this Matrix Computing concept.

If a major breakthrough in technologies like Quantum Computers, Neural Computers, or DNA computers occur then things could happen a lot sooner and the Moore's law timetable could be rescaled. Although unproven and an aspect of metaphysical study, the conclusion of the Mayan calendar occurs on December 21, 2012. Is that the date humans give birth to "A.I. consciousness?" We'll just have to wait this one out and find out for sure, but realistically speaking, such massive computing power of the future can only reasonably be used for one thing, artificial intelligence.