Gadgetory

welcome to crash course the only scientific venue on the planet where you can wear a tank top and simultaneously discuss field effect transistor theory probably probably not but it sounded cool Intel has claimed that by the year 2026 processors will contain as many transistors as there are neurons in a healthy human brain if transistors are still a bit finicky at this point check out the video right here currently the highest end CPUs that we have available Broadwell e5z on chips contain just over seven billion transistors and a human brain if you're willing to equate neurons two transistors I know it's a stretch contains about 70 billion of them they're all estimates we're a tenth of the way there folks that doesn't mean the CPUs will just magically begin thinking for themselves when we power them on does it let's put this into perspective CPUs contain an array of transistors segregated into blocks or clusters what we call cores each of these cores contains a number of pipelines through which binary data is sent and retrieved and the greater the number of pipelines the less congested data will be while being processed in a human brain it is estimated that over 100 million of these molecular connections exist and that each neural synapse which involves the diffusion of an impulse when that part of the brain is stimulated contains over 1,000 quote-unquote switches that correspond to little transistors within the die of a CPU or GPU again mentioned in the last crash course episode Japanese and German scientists attempted to replicate neural functioning via the use of their 83,000 processor supercomputer but in the end were only able to mimic an embarrassing one percent of total brain activity that occurs every second and even that took the supercomputer 40 minutes to accomplish simply put the technology that exists today is not capable of such a creation when transistors become too small quantum tunneling prevents electrons from ceasing to flow something that transistors must be able to do and if space isn't a concern it simply isn't feasible to build entire rooms packed with processors to mimic brain activity least at this point I expect it will have moved on to something other than transistors by the time we mimic human brainwave activity and at around the same time that artificial intelligence will will emerge what does this action signify as you entered when you looked at the other human what does it mean it's a sign of trust it's a human thing you wouldn't understand my father tried to teach me human emotions they are difficult you have to do what someone asks you don't you detective Spooner how did you know my name don't you if you love them but back to transistors for just one second 14 nanometers which is the current Center for Intel skylake CPUs as well as AMD players GPUs is not a description of the size of the transistors embedded in both of these chips it's actually the degree of precision within a single die so how accurate cuts into the semiconductor can be and how accurate segments can be prepared for transistor insertion transistors themselves are much smaller an element I didn't know this beforehand so a single transistor is much smaller than 40 nanometers we're talking atoms here as in a single transistor in your fancy new skylake CPU is only a few atoms long tens of thousands of times smaller than the width of a single human hair in fact over 1 million of these transistors could fit comfortably into the space of this dot you don't you know see it that dot right there so we can't go much smaller than that without feeling quantum effects which limits our ability to come even close to the neural mapping of a human brain Stephen J Smith former professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University's School of Medicine what a title deduce the following conclusion quote a single human brain has more switches than all of the computers and routers and internet connections on earth and quote so we can take this to mean that even if some sort of artificial intelligence attempted to manifest itself within the world's first 70 billion transistors CPU this would be known as the technological singularity by the way chances are the intellect of that machine would be far underdeveloped compared to that of a healthy adult human brain do you agree with Descartes and I think therefore I am do you think a lot of humans ask me if I can make choices or is everything I do and say is programmed the best way I can respond to that is to say that everything humans animals and robots do is programmed to a degree so how much of that is is coming from what you've programmed it to say it's a mix some some of it's coming from knowledge on the web some of it is written and as my technology improves it is anticipated that I will be able to integrate new words that I hear and learn online and in real time I may not get everything right say the wrong thing and sometimes not know what to say but every day I make progress pretty remarkable in fact it's very likely that the first AI we encounter will behave much like an infant very curious about its surroundings but completely unaware of its potential to become the sky that we've always feared sky why is that in the script that you