For a long time people have dreamt about creating robots and other technologies that could behave as humans. This was always a far off, extremely hypothetical idea, at least as far as the general population thought.
That may not be the case anymore. Recently IBM has been working on a computer chip that is supposed to work more like the human brain than anything the technological world has seen before. What does that mean, for technology, and for the human population? Are we slowly going to be overrun by robots that have become more and more like us? Will this technology be used in wars? Espionage? How are we going to make use of a computer this powerful?
All of these options seem to be totally possible, at least if you have any imagination at all, but in reality this computer chip, though one of the smallest we've seen, uses the most energy we have seen. The human brain uses about 20 watts of energy whereas this genius piece of technology consumes about a kilowatt of energy to do the same amount of work.
Now, I'm all about conserving some energy, so to me hearing that is not promising, but it maybe that a technological revolution is about to take place. One in which there are not separate programs for everything that software can do. This would mean that many of our current technologies would become obsolete, that they can be replaced by these "human like" chips that consolidate the amount of software, programming, hardware, and therefore energy actually needed. That idea is very appealing to me, that we could simply replace older technology with this more advanced technology and it would get rid of a lot of the excess energy that we consume.
We'll see what happens... how will we use this great advance in technology to further society?
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