The passage is on page 670. It is the passage that starts with "Biology as it was once practiced".
This passage describes how computers have specifically changed how the Biology field has changed with increasing digital technology. The scientists in the field once used computers merely to record the findings of their experiments, but today, they are using the computer to carry out the experiments.
I think that this passage is amazing because it goes to show us how technology progresses from an assistant to the physical world (as a tool), to a modeler of the physical, and perhaps eventually to an encompassment of the physical in the future. Technology one day may not be completely dependent on people as it is today. Looking backward to how much computers have increased in speed and capability in the near past, it is scary to think what computers will be like in 100 years or more. I personally think that computers will start to become more biologically oriented instead of merely advanced abacus’s.
In the rest of this essay, there is reference to how the technology we are using today is beginning to observe things for biologists rather than just being there for data entry. One fine example is the mapping of DNA, which is done mostly by computers now. With the advancement of computers to where it is now, computers can do the monitoring and the insertion of data rather than people.
In an article I found on the internet (it’s rather old), at http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm, the author is discussing the plausibility of a computer eventually becoming as smart as a human, and he asks the question “Why tie up a rare twenty-million-dollar asset to develop one ersatz-human, when millions of inexpensive original-model humans are available?” And I find it interesting that eventually, far down the road, computers will be as smart as humans, and they won’t cost twenty million dollars.
The reason I think this is because I believe that people will eventually become the computers. In the same article, it says that humans, at their best, use 1/30th of their brain’s computing power. And we are just now creating (large scale) computers that can rival that. Except for one problem, the computers are always, and will always BE external because they are not biological, so complete union is impossible. Even in the case of Darth Vader, technology wasn’t completely fused with flesh, he still had distinct parts, some of which were biological, some of which were electronic.
Sure technology can help us observe biological happenings which the passage on 670 refers to, but my proposal is that we as humans will never be able to unify with our technology in cyberspace or elsewhere until the technology becomes biological and we are able to tap into the other 29/30ths of our brain’s computing power.
4 comments:
I really enjoyed this section about technology in the book. Something that does relate to your proposal is that there are currently technologies out there that do wire directly into the brain. Blind people can get this special pair of glasses that's wired directly into their brain and will cause white lights to appear in their vision based an objects proximity. Scientists are managing to make human sight without the use of eyes. There's also nano-technologies that are opening up a whole new world of biological technologies.
Part of me wonders if we would actually need to unlock the rest of our brain to become unified with technology since it could just as well be possible that the technology will be able to use those sections subconsciously and redirect that information to the active parts of the brain.
Noted with interest: Robots evolve to learn cooperation, hunting
^^^ sweet link.
We might not be using 29/30th of our brain power. With super computers, do we need to? I wonder if it's something like Einstein...he had 24 hours in a day and look what he accomplished. Was it his brain or the proper application of thoughts during the day? Things that make you go hmmmm...or beep beep beep...
Post a Comment