Brain Archive

Originally published November 3, 1999 at NYTimes.com. Published on KurzweilAI.net May 31, 2001.

Has the invasion already begun? Are the aliens already right under our noses? Are machines, the products of human engineering intelligence, poised to take over the world--or is this an irrational fear, the latest spasm of the Luddite spirit? Finally, is the whole idea just a clever marketing ploy for the investment-hungry artificial intelligence industry? Here we have three books, all written by experts in computer intelligence, aimed to persuade us that the Age of Machines is nigh. We are to be eclipsed by our own technology, ceding our outdated flesh, blood and neural tissue to integrated circuits and their mechanistic progeny. The future belongs to the robots.

The roots of this dystopian vision (or utopian, depending on your view) go back to a prediction made in the mid-1960's by a former chairman of Intel, Gordon Moore, that the size of each transistor on an integrated circuit will be reduced by 50 percent every 24 months. This prediction, now grandly known as Moore's law, implies the exponentially expanding power of circuit-based computation over time. A rough corollary is that you will get double the computational power for the same price at two-year intervals. Thus computers today can perform millions more computations per second than equivalently priced computers of only a few decades ago. It is further predicted that new computer technologies will take over where integrated circuits leave off and continue the inexorable march toward exponentially increasing computational power. The computational capacity of the human brain is only a few decades away from being duplicated on an affordable computing machine. Brains are about to be outpaced by one of their products. They are already being outdone in certain areas: speed of calculation, data storage, theorem-proving, chess.

Complete article available at NYTimes.com

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