Computers - Some crazy thoughts

Can computers get smarter than humans? Will there be a future when humans will give way to robots. A future dominated by brains and void of hearts. A future with no love, no breakups, no shouts of joy, no painful tears.
A future where every action is accountably aimed at preprogrammed results.
A future when people would admire the foresight of 21st century Hollywood film makers?
Could there be a future when the reigning species of this world would no longer be of a divine origin?

A few years back, these were just crazy thoughts that could come to anybody’s mind. But time has been grating away the craziness out of them. We are in a present which is galloping towards the future so fast that we are almost living in the past.

The upper half of the 21st century witnessed a modern day evolution. The evolution of computers. From vacuum tubes to transistors to ICs and Microprocessors it flourished at an astounding pace.
The cyber evolution can be compared in many ways to the natural one. First came the dinosaurs, the billion dollar monsters which can haunt you with its complexity and humble you with its performance. People were happy with them then. Nobody even had the vaguest idea on how the modern computers would look like.
People were so happy with their masterpiece that Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM in the 1940s once said "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
Had Sherlock Homes been a bit more serious, this could have been the joke of the millennium. By 2010 the number of computer users is expected to be 1 billion!!.

The point is that computers are evolving- just like we all evolved from our hairy ancestors. The only difference being that they are evolving at a rate incomparable to ours. The old obese machines have been replaced by sleek Palmtops in less than half a century’s time. But now we know that it isn’t the end of it. Those cool expensive gadgets start their trot to the trash box right from the day they are launched.
You will be an outdated techie if that’s a 6 month old mobile you have in your pocket. Somewhere in Japan someone would have already launched a 6 times faster 6 times smaller gadget at almost the same price.

So will there be a time when technology would be so advanced that humans will have equal counterparts from science. Will there be a time when robots with an IQ comparable to our’s share a space in this world? To answer this lets take a quick glance into the past. Some 60 years back, engineers worked on billion dollar machines that spanned across rooms, used paper punched cards for storage and manually switched complex circuits to perform a desired operation. Few decades down the line, I am sitting here in my cubicle writing some crap on my PC with my flat panel LCD screen adjusted to the right color and contrast - scrolling across windows using my LED mouse- blaming my 512 MB RAM to be two low.
And who am I to speak. Some guys in Japan are making their robots play football tournaments every year. Each year they learn new tactics, playing smarter and faster all by their own - through AI. The 100 megabyte hard drive that weighed two and a quarter tons and cost more than US$130,000 in 1968 has his grandson carrying 100 times more memory and a size so small that u it can get lost in your pocket. So the whole of cyber history has its finger pointing towards one simple fact. Computers will grow smarter and intelligent as humans. But can they grow smarter? Can they cross the line of human IQ and go beyond it to an extend were humans will no longer control them. On the contrary can we have a fate of being controlled by machines we gave birth to? A horrifying yet interesting scenario to brood over.

It is quite clear that man will someday make a machine as intelligent as him. The question is can he make it smarter? Before we conclude on this lets take a look at the current computer architecture. I am not planning to go into the real physical architecture as I am unaware of it. I am talking about the conceptual one.
I feel that a computer is a highly inefficient replica of a human body. It has a brain that is under developed, input devices performing functions similar to our sense organs. Almost all part of the human body is an output device.

To be more precise, let’s consider a guy watching a movie. His eyes receive the light signals from the screen, sends it to his brain. The brain processes these light signals and interprets them into images. Now let’s see how a computer reads a CD. The CD player picks the binary data from the CD which is then send to the CPU. The CPU interprets these meaningless streams of 0s and 1s to images based on some pre defined algorithm.

So where does the difference between a human and a computer come from? Is it the memory that’s different or is it the processor? I say its both. Humans really fall short when it comes to processing speed and memory power when compared to a modern day computer. Then where exactly is the spark that makes us smarter than computers.
Definitely it’s not the hardware which is supreme and if it isn’t the hardware it’s got to be the software. Given below is a text from an interesting forward mail I received. Do take a look.

"hi evrey bdoy
I cdnuolt blveiee taht i cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht i was rdanieg the phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porblem. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and i awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt "
Hmm.. My MS Word has put red lines all under it.
But my brain understood all. How could this be possible? Definitely it has nothing to do with memory or processing speed. It’s just that somehow my inbuilt word processor works much better than what Bill Gates and his engineers coded in years.
So I feel the OS is what differentiates man from other living/non living entities. An OS powered with almost all features one could think of. An OS compatible with almost any application at the same time susceptible to Viruses making men go crazy. An OS coded in a language which nobody could ever read. Or so I suspect.
So if man has to make a machine intelligent than him, he needs to design an OS that is more powerful than the human brain.
Considering the fact that we ourselves couldn’t completely decode the complexities of our brain and are left with a lot of unanswered questions which eventually points to the almighty, I see the possibilities of such an OS a far cry from the present.

But we have always relied on scientific advancements on such areas. People have always claimed that one day science would unravel the whole mystery of our existence itself. If we go by these arguments we have to believe that science will someday allow man to create something which can go beyond his spectrum of intelligence.

But here is where you can go really crazy thinking. Human beings are intelligent animals which he owes to his complex mind or OS– agreed. But somehow I have this feeling that there is a threshold upto which our brain can take us. It may vary from individual to individual, but it should exist. Assuming so, can man ever think beyond what his brain allows him to? I think not. Lets take a simple example.

A rat has a brain which is much smaller than ours. But it is intelligent enough to go search for food, find shelter, sense danger and reproduce. I am taking a wide guess on how a rat would perceive the world around it. People chasing rats are a common household event. Why does the rat run? Is it because it knows that human’s are intelligent than itself and could potentially cause its death? I think not? I feel the rat run’s because it feels it knows how to fool a human. It feels his brain is smarter than the guy running behind. Or maybe not. But I am forced to believe that a rat also has a perception of this world and could give you reasons for the many phenomenons that happen around him. He might also have a theory for seasonal changes, for the sky, the moon, the sun. And he might also have a lot of unanswered questions. But can he ever reach a stage where he would answer the mysteries around him. Will there be a Newton rat or Einstein rat who could provide answers to his fellow rats. That would be very interesting. But I think NO.
No rat would ever find out why really some cheese tastes better than another. Why sometimes it’s cold around and sometimes its hot. A rat might know that a white piece of cheese tastes than a black one. But he may never know why the cheese really got black. The reason being that its brain doesn’t allow him to think so.


So we will have to conclude that man cannot simply build something beyond his intelligence horizon for the simple reason that his OS will never permit him to do so.
But here we have two possibilities
One scenario is that our OS utilizes the maximum of our hardware (brain) and cant go any further. This is a dead end. Nothing more can be talked or written about this.

But there is another interesting possibility –

A software engineer can write a code on multiple machines, using multiple languages, using a variety of logics. One may be better than the other. But we can never say that we have the best ever code. Anything can be done in a different way to make it better or worse. I feel that there can never exist a perfect code.
So is there a way by which we can understand our OS and maybe code it differently?
Considering the fact that our mind got installed right when we came to this world and has been getting upgraded as we grow, it is obvious that the coding was automated. So what is that which triggers this upgradation?
For every action there is a cause that triggers it. Everything in this universe abides by this rule.All except the creation of universe which scientists believe to be due to a "big bang". The cause for that initial cause is ofcource unknown. Even scientists have to take refuge in the devine intervention here. But that’s a different story. In our case there should be some command which upgrades our OS automatically at different stages in our life.
In Hindu mythology it is said that "The answers to all your questions are within you". Maybe we just need to ask the right questions to ourselves. Maybe we just need to frame the right query and wait for the answers. I think this was exactly what the Rishis and Saints of olden times tried to do. To decode our OS - To ask the right questions. To recode it as we require.Many would have gone really mad doing this . They would have messed up everything. But some would have succeeded. And they would have been considered as Avatar’s of god. People would have started worshiping them.

Maybe these are all just stupid crazy thoughts that comes to an overworked software engineer's mind when he gets a little time to spare. But its an intriguing one.
Anyways I have had enough of this. Got to stop this now. ADIOS.. Crazy Comments Invited :)