Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Computers match people in some roles, and when fast decisions are needed in a crisis, they often outclass them. The human brain has a wiring defect that prevents it from absorbing several streams of information simultaneously and acting on them quickly. Throw too many things at the brain at one time and it freezes up; it evolved more than 100,000 years ago, when the tempo of life was slower...
...still in control, but the capabilities of computers are increasing at a fantastic rate, while raw human intelligence is changing slowly, if at all. Computer power is growing exponentially; it has increased tenfold every eight years since 1946. Four generations of computer evolution-vacuum tubes, transistors, simple integrated circuits and today's miracle chips-followed one another in rapid succession, and the fifth generation, built out of such esoteric devices as bubble memories and Josephson junctions, will be on the market in the 1980s. In the 1990s, when the sixth generation appears, the compactness and reasoning power...
...that time, ultra-intelligent machines will be working in partnership with our best minds on all the serious problems of the day, in an unbeatable combination of brute reasoning power and human intuition. What happens after that? Dartmouth President John Kemeny, a pioneer in computer usage, sees the ultimate relation between man and computer as a symbiotic union of two living species, each completely dependent on the other for survival. The computer-a new form of life dedicated to pure thought-will be taken care of by its human partners, who will minister to its bodily needs with electricity...
Computer intelligence is growing by leaps and bounds, with no natural limit in sight. But human evolution is a nearly finished chapter in the history of life. The human brain has not changed, at least in gross size, in the past 100,000 years, and while the organization of the brain may have improved in that period, the amount of information and wiring that can be crammed into a cranium of fixed size is limited...
...highest form of life on the earth was a worm. The intelligent life in these other, older solar systems must be as different from us as we are from creatures wriggling in the ooze. Those superintendent beings surely will not be housed in the more or less human shapes portrayed in Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In a cosmos that has endured for billions of years against man's mere million, the human form is not likely to be the standard form for intelligent life...