Host
Crystal Barnes
Podcast Content
This is one of the most exciting medical devices that is hitting the market, and one that could not have been done without embedded computers. The da Vinci is another robot-based surgical system, which relies on computing to perform. Some of the most advanced medical devices used by doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare professionals contain embedded computer chips, which enable our providers to perform incredible feats, with astounding accuracy. Classical computers refers to the computers that you are using to read this article, the kind that uses something called bits as the building blocks.
If a few computers did that, then a lot of people would say that we are dealing with an actual living form. Computers simply have to be such an integral part of all human activities that humans cannot--or will not--imagine doing these things without them. Computers are already dominant, human life is already largely conducted inside of them, and humans are happy about that. The more that people like using computers to do everything, the more that life feels incomplete if it does not take place inside of them.
Many really do believe high intelligence could have evolved just somehow out of low intelligence. The gulf between organic and synthetic intelligence seems small at times, as we anthropomorphize machines, encouraged by the terms in computing such as intelligence, learning, and sight. AI makes mistakes that humans do not, which is why some experts are trying to fit the psychology of human cognition into machines. Computer scientists are using different forms of machine learning, regardless if that learning is deep.
Machines may become just as conscious as humans, perhaps more, when programmed in this manner. Instead of machines trying to persuade humans they are humans, machines are now hoping to persuade humans they are actually computers. Just like Turings original Thinking Machine tried to pass itself off as man or woman, the computer is trying to pass itself off, to some extent, as something else. We do not usually, in fact; relationships are a two-way street, and a computer can be an impressively sophisticated machine, but it is still a machine.
We feed information to computers, manipulating their capabilities in our favor -- but we have to give them, in exchange, the intelligence to react, to affect the universe. Computers offer a separate form of space, separate from our own Universe, time borrowed from our own. These universes are not entirely free of our control; we incorporated into the architecture of their invention a capability for influence over their processes. With the invention of the computer, we, as the scientific species, have liberated the power to generate entire spheres of existence--universes--with the press of a button.
When it comes to biocomputing, we have just begun to scratch the surface on how we might leverage biological systems to our benefit in order to develop an entire set of unique, and very needed, solutions to problems present in current computer science. As research into synthetic biology advances and becomes more well-established, it does not seem an extravagant thought to think we might be able to manipulate biological systems to such a degree that they would function, essentially, as a new form of computation.
Research shows that using biomaterials such as bacteria, enzymes, and others, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were able to build a computer that could do basic calculations and store data using genetic materials. Scientists from Lund University were able to create a schematic structure using nanoparticles, with molecules acting as the electrons of a current running through the circuit, in order to do calculations. Integrases refer to specialized enzymes used to drive the electrical current into a transcriptor, and they function as a signal amplifier when the RNA is traveling through DNA, similar to the real transistors in an electric computer circuit.
Going deeper on this topic, it is true that some computers are capable of thinking at varying, embryonic levels, but we would not call them conscious, since they are not pushing themselves as being conscious. This, combined with the human tendency naturally to see faces in oatmeal and personalities in tiny electronic pets, may get us in seriously misdirected ideas about what is really going on when computers, or really anything, stops working. As UI designers and technical support people discovered to their dismay, humans just are not thinking about computers in the right ways.
OK, there are a few pathetic individuals who really, really think computers are scary, death-eyed monstrosities dedicated to destroying mankind generally, and computer-phobic word-processing documents specifically. Computers that screw up are almost always doing precisely what they are told, with precisely the data that is provided.
Instead, the bells, the cars, the cabs, are simply being moved within computers, where they are allowed to generate new affects. When using computers is detached from their ends, becoming a way of life, goals and problems only feel relevant if they can be addressed and solved by computing systems. Sophisticated computers serve the sole purpose of being programmed into them by humans, for our benefit, just like intelligent stoves and driverless cars.
Alan Turing therefore imagined a version where one of two humans is human, the other is machine, as computers are. There were also the Reverse Turing Tests, where humans tried to guess which actors were humans from the computer group. A computer passes the test if the other person on the outside cannot tell which is which.