The future of computing power
September 19th, 2005In this article at Korea’s JoongAng Daily, the President of Lucent Technologies research division states that by 2060, computer CPUs will have the capacity of every human brain combined. That’s a pretty bold prediction, but perhaps not as farfetched as we might think. For those familiar with Ray Kurzweil (more here), the futurist, author, inventor, and AI expert you might recall he predicted in the 1990s that by 2019 the PC will have the processing power of one human brain. By 2029, 1,000 human brains.
Needless to say, computational capacity of big computing machines remains a salient issue, but rarely is it put into terms of human brain processing. One claim has the human brain capable of nearly 20-million-billion calculations per second. But who really knows how accurate that is.
