Ask A Genius 140 – Computational Power
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/06
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Rick Rosner: If you want to add processors, you might have to run the cable up through your neck, which seems like it is probably not the best way to do it. So I think if you’re going to start laying in extra computational power. You gotta do it on the inside of the skull. That, maybe, the fanciest supped up brains in the future will maybe have an added layer of computational capacity that wallpapers the inside of your skull.
Or sits as an added layer that wraps around your brain, that can over time, perhaps, drop tendrils into your brain in the way your brain links up more thoroughly with itself by sending out a zillion other dendrites. Also, if you wanted to get sneaky about it, you could probably “alienize” the back of your head. You don’t want to give yourself one of those Mars Attacks giant veiny skulls.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I was thinking about war again [Laughing]. War is like a drug for nations as a whole – sufficiently enough people with sufficiently enough fervor to pursue wide scale murder on either side, or maybe one side. But in hindsight, like decades hence, people look at it with horror, and then with a quaint, “What the hell were they thinking?”
RR: Hold on! It wouldn’t be “what the hell are they thinking?” I think the future will look at our history full of war and other bad behaviours. It will be seen as consequences of their limited and evolved nature. You know, when we see like 2 bucks with full sets of antlers battling it out, we don’t look at it with horror. We think this is their evolved behaviour and that this we are primates and have these in-built behaviours.
That when populations grew large, these are the consequences of those large behaviours. War in the future will still happen, but in different terms. We are seeing all sorts of war by proxy in the Mid-East with drone-based warfare and robot-based warfare and we’ve seen with Stuxnet that was deployed by the US plus Israel – a worm virus that got into the centrifuges in Iraq until they spun out of control and then fizzed out Iraq’s initiative to build nuclear bombs.
So we have war by proxy. Future war will probably be more concerning because we have been at war with Russia for a year without knowing it. Russia was fighting with us in our election and wrecking it via hacking. Whatever their term is for destructive propaganda, fake news, now, Russia has infected several tens of millions of Americans with complete distrust of news that was trusted for straightforward journalism that has been trusted for centuries.
That’s war. Yea, they may look back at wholesale slaughter with horror. Hitler might be in the 3rd place for people he caused to die compared to Mao or Stalin, but the loss of information processing entities in the future may be as horrible but played out in less flesh-based ways.
SDJ: I think about the importance about image. I might be remembering something vaguely from Errol Morris when he was talking about the power of image, or the frame of an image, or what is an image leaving out, or does it have color, is it black-and-white or not, what is its title and description, what is its era, what is left out of the standard rectangle or square frames, or is it high fidelity or not.
RR: You’re talking about Errol Morris’s presentation or thesis that any kind of photography leaves out more information than it captures, right?
SDJ: Yea. I also relate it to what sparked this part of the conversation, which was seeing an image of a Sherman tank, but an old one – still driving around, worn out, and crushing a car. I thought about wars that, to your example. The bucks, they clang heads, and they clash. We think, “That’s part of their genetic heritage in bucks competing with one another for dominance.”
We consider that part of the end of result or near end result of their reproductive life cycle based on the genes in tandem with the environment, but that’s us looking at a whole other species. Maybe, people in the middle future. They are still us or have elements of us because they come from that for the most part. I think there still will be a sense of horror, or of quaintness or vague pity. [Laughing] A high definition consciousness pity.
RR: It’s not dissimilar. I’ve offered a couple analogies that you’ve—like the buck, you said it wasn’t that on point, but when we look back at a costume drama set in 1810. We feel sorry for the people. These were people who had to shit in chamber pots. They’d be lucky to live into their 50s or 60s. A lot of that stuff is hidden from the viewer, but we are supposed to enjoy the picturesqueness and the idyllicness of it.
But these people, you have to feel for those people given the limitations of their lives. My kid does a lot of work and research on people of that era, like the Brontë sisters. There were 5 sisters and a brother. Only one lived past 30, Charlotte, who was gone by 39. Jane Austen, I think she was gone by 41. They died like crazy. And they had limited means of expression.
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