Science doesn't care what you believe
We often imagine that human consciousness is as simple as the input and output of electrical signals within a network of processing units – therefore comparable to a computer. The reality, however, is much more complicated. For starters, we don’t actually know how much information the human brain can hold. Two years ago, a team …
Continue reading “When will we be able to upload our brains to a computer?”
Subhash Kak, Oklahoma State University Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated “quantum supremacy” – that is, it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly critiqued the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same …
Continue reading “A quantum computing future is unlikely, due to random hardware errors”
In 1930, a year into the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes sat down to write about the economic possibilities of his grandchildren. Despite widespread gloom as the global economic order fell to its knees, the British economist remained upbeat, saying that the ‘prevailing world depression … blind[s] us to what is going on under the …
Continue reading “We have the tools and technology to work less and live better”
Scott Shackelford, Indiana University Fifty years ago, a UCLA computer science professor and his student sent the first message over the predecessor to the internet, a network called ARPANET.
