filed under Daily Dose
Computers to overtake the human brain sooner rather than later
12:53AM ON
12/27/2007
BY
Ari Savitzky
I went to Staples today to buy some office supplies, and ended up looking at external hard drives. At first, I was looking at those ‘lil USB keys, which now take up to 8 Gigabytes of data. Remember a month ago, when a 1 GB one was huge? I meandered over to the shelf with the massive external drives, which were maxing out a year ago at around 300 GB, or about 21 years of continuous music (90,000 songs).
Today, the biggest model’s storage capacity was 1 terrabyte, or 1,000 GB. The human brain is estimated to have a storage capacity of 3 TB. Our synapses are probs more efficient information users than, say, Microsoft Vista. But a 1 TB storage drive for sale at Staples is a breathtaking if banal example of the exponential growth implied by Moore’s Law and fueled by consumers’ demand for somewhere to stash their downloads. It’s also a reminder that while computers might be able to drive an empty car through traffic on a city street, beat a Russian opposition leader at chess or store an assload of movies, they still can’t catch a baseball or have a conversation.
December 27th, 2007 at 1:17PM
Eric Smith Says:
that gif is creepy as hell.
[Reply]