technocoy said:
yes there are lots of things that were predicted and never happened, but that doesn't mean they aren't possible. we could very easily be flying around today had the interest an focus in travel been on that. if you had shown a photo and a desrcription of your mac and os x 50 years ago, they would have laughed you off the planet...
Laughed off the planet? Hardly. For one thing, a photo is altogether different than rampant speculation, but putting that aside for the moment, the development of the modern computer was pretty clear in the fifties. If you were standing in 1955 describing a 2005 machine, I'm sure some would be surprised or doubtful, but there would also be many who concede that its possible.
Change 50 years to something like 300 years, and then you might be correct.
One problem with making predictions 45 years out is that science is really facing some big hurdles now, hurdles that delve down into the fundamental workings of the universe. Nobody can be 100% sure that these riddles are even solvable. Its entirely possible that chip fab processes will never go below 10nm, simply because of quantum physics. Then again, maybe in 5 years a research will make a huge breakthrough and we'll actually be way *ahead* of our current trajectory.
Maybe in 20 years we'll have advanced nanotech. This is a big "if". It could be that we simply can't make nanotech feasible for most applications. But if we can, then it will change the world completely. By the way, IMO, the only way to "download" a brain in any reasonable amount of time is to have nanomachines that can visit each neuron, experiment on it, and return back estimates of its connectivity, threshold values, and activation function. If that's what this crackpot even means by "download" a brain. Its not like the brain has a serial port and a bootstrap program to download all of its "code".
But also, even if our brains can be downloaded into a computer world, what does that have to do with immortality? Its not like having a copy of your brain is a copy of you...its just a different person that remarkably thinks and acts exactly like you! Until they begin to be exposed to different stimuli and slowly develop differently.
Finally, to say that computers in 2050 will be as powerful as the human brain, he must be using a very vague definition of power. Anybody who knows much about neurology or computer science knows that the brain and a CPU are two entirely different types of computer. The brain has very slow switching times and massive parallelism, where as CPUs have extremely fast switching times and minimal parallelism. Comparing the two is an inane exercise, and adapting one machine to solve the problems that other one is good at seems to be a waste.
I'm not an AI expert, but I do know that real intelligence is still far, far off in the future. Hopefully by 2050 we have robots that can fend for themselves and figure out what we want them to do without us having to explicitly program them...but smart as a human? Nope, not in 2050. And neither will we have flying cities either.
