October 22nd, 2024
Let’s imagine a geneticist in the future who engineers a normal house fly’s genes to make its brain 4 million times bigger and 3 thousand times faster. What do you think this SuperFly could be capable of?
Let’s compare this fly’s brain with a human brain. The human brain has 86 billion neurons, while the normal fly’s brain has a mere 140,000 neurons. Thus, the human brain is something like 62 thousand times bigger than the fly brain. But SuperFly’s brain would have 560 billion neurons — over 6 times as big as the human’s! Moreover, running 3 thousand times faster, it would completely outstrip the performance of the human brain. Super-Fly would look upon humans with the same sense of superiority that we have for, well, normal houseflies.
Looks and sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But let’s examine a similar comparison: between the Apple II and the iMac: Note that the iMac has, overall, the same superiority over the Apple II that SuperFly has over the normal fly. You’ll agree that SuperFly could do fabulous things, vastly superior to even what we humans could do. But the iMac, despite a similar level of superiority to the Apple II, has nowhere near the immense relative power of SuperFly. It’s the software that makes the iMac fall so far short of our expectations. We humans are too dumb to be able to program the iMac to realize its full potential. That’s because we don’t truly understand computers.
The best proof of our collective stupidity when it comes to computers comes from our efforts at educational software. You probably don’t know that educational software was one of the first applications for computers imagined by computer people way back in the 1950s. Educational software has always been a hot topic in lectures, magazines, and conferences. And yet… it just hasn’t worked out.
Classes in the 21st century aren’t much different from classes a hundred years ago.
This isn’t for lack of trying; lots of very smart people have dedicated their lives to creating effective educational software.
Yet, for all that intellectual energy, it just hasn’t worked. Educators have spent a microscopic amount of money on educational software.
Where have we failed? What have we done wrong?
Those aren’t the most useful questions to ask. It is more productive to ask, “What great discovery is hiding behind this huge anomaly?” The answer is obvious, yet we just can’t accept it: we don’t understand computers.
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The moral of this story: We still do not understand the true nature of computers.