Thursday, March 13, 2008

Rise of the Machines (Critical Learning Part 2)

Most of you might remember the popular movie the Matrix where machines take over the world as we know it. Such a movie played with the fears of people of being conquered by something they create whether it be a robot, or something else. What comes as a surprise in this whole deal is how is it that rather than trying to stop that from happening, we are just sitting down and playing with our thumbs, Home-Style!
Computers, as we all know, are machines that can compute one thing at a time, at a super-fast speed (if you add dual-core, than 2). There is little to no hope that we can possibly one day match their speed with raw force, why then are trying to do this? With the current system of education, it seems as if though most people were trying to to beat the computer in things like adding, remembering, and other one-action tasks. Hence, one again the importance of using our critical thinking. Machines, under this ideology, are made to compliment our living, while the critical thinkers take the complicated decisions.
In the current future forecast of copy-paste knowledge, the future is much more grim. With humans providing a similar or worst contribution to the world, what then would be left for humans to do? Sit down and die? Become sources of energy?
"The concept, not date" should then be the norm, not the option.

1 comment:

Oscar said...

I find your post confusing. First you talk about machines taking over the world such as in the move The Matrix. Then you talk about the computation power of computers and humans trying to match them. Then education/critical thinking, computational assistance theory, and then foretell the end of the world. By the way, where is your quote from because I still don't understand it?

The reason computers can perform math better than humans can is because they have what is called an Arithmetic Unit (AU) within the Central Processing Unit (CPU). All the AU does is add. It is hardwired to only perform addition and it does it very well. How does it subtract? It adds a negative number. How does it multiply? It adds logarithms. How does it divide? It takes the second term of the division and then performs binary arithmetic to find an inverse (aka complement) and then performs multiplication; again using logarithms.

Our brains are geared for survival while the computers is geared to add.

As a programmer, I write instructions for computers in a high-level language. I think it will be a long time before a computer writes instructions for itself.
On a positive note, I liked your pictures.