Neil Gershenfeld
speaker
1,202 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2023
last heard May 2023
Neil Gershenfeld’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Your brain does 10 to the 17 ops per second.
It has about 10 to the 15 synapses and they run at about a hundred Hertz.
So as of a year or two ago,
the performance of a big computer matched a brain.
So you could view AI as a breakthrough, but the real story is within about a year or two ago, and let's see, the supercomputer has about 10 to the 15 transistors in the processors, 10 to the 15 transistors in the memory, which is the synapses in your brain.
So the real breakthrough was the computers matched the computational capacity
of a brain, and so we'd be sort of derelict if they couldn't do about the same thing.
But now the reason I'm mentioning that is the chip fab making the supercomputer is placing about 10 to the 10 transistors a second.
While you're digesting your lunch right now, you're placing about 10 to the 18 parts per second.
There's an eight order of magnitude difference.
So in computational capacity, it's done.
We've caught up.
But there's eight orders of magnitude difference in the rate at which biology can build versus state-of-the-art manufacturing can build.
And that distinction is what we're talking about.
That distinction is...
not analog, but this deep sense of digital fabrication, of embodying codes in construction.
So a description doesn't describe a thing, but the description becomes the thing.
So the casual meaning is a computer controls a tool to make something.
And that was invented when MIT stole it in 1952.
There's the deep meaning of what the ribosome does, of a digital description doesn't describe a thing.
Showing 341–360 of 1,202 · page 18 of 61
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