I was reading Michael Crichtons "the terminal man" and knowing how he likes to link fact in with his fiction i was wondering if there was really a dreaded watershed week for scientists when "the information handling capacity of all the computers in the world first exceeded the information handling capacity of all the human brains in the world"??
2006-10-05 07:37:54 · 8 answers · asked by Dave Daver 1 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Other - Science
No, i disagree. computers can only handle binary data, as far as i am aware. they cannot handle emotions. so how can you say that computers exceed the information handling capacity of all the human brains in the world?
what about the information capacity required in storing emotion?
2006-10-05 07:43:48 · answer #1 · answered by Balaboo 5 · 0⤊ 2⤋
In 1969 it would have taken a thousand square feet to house the computing power you keep on your desktop. For goodness sakes, the atomic bomb was designed by scientists using slide rules, no computational assistance othr than that.
Modern computers can store an unprecedented amount of information. The difference between brains and computers is that people's brains are capable of connecting seemingly unrelated nuggets of information to produce new concepts.
We call this "creative thought", or "synthesis", and no matter how many facts we cram into a computer, it can never generate an independent idea.
2006-10-10 01:56:41 · answer #2 · answered by chocolahoma 7 · 0⤊ 2⤋
This question is rather irrelevant. Whether computers store more info than man could never be known, because you could never accurately quiz an adult human on all he knows. It certainly would not be the data storage of 1969 computers. Would be lucky if there was a terabyte total stored at that time. Now? Maybe, everything is on a computer somewhere. But as you can see, the computers are not taking over.
2016-11-16 12:48:52 · answer #3 · answered by themblues 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
No. The watershed has not been reached yet. All the computers in the world today do not exceed the information handling capacity of all the human brains in the world.
2016-04-27 18:38:04 · answer #4 · answered by John T 1 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I'm not sure about information handling, but when the IBM computer "Deep Blue" beat Gary Kasparov at chess, I felt that a barrier had definately been crossed.
2006-10-05 07:45:09 · answer #5 · answered by Rich N 3 · 0⤊ 1⤋
There's more to power than information handling capacity. My PC can probably handle more bytes of info than I can; but I can switch it off.
2006-10-05 07:49:31 · answer #6 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 2⤋
No effect at all
Like the book "1984" we'll see it over the next decade
2006-10-05 07:40:22 · answer #7 · answered by god knows and sees else Yahoo 6 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Why certainly.
2006-10-05 07:46:42 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 1⤋