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This doesn't strike me as a reasonable analogy. 1) Microchips don't grow autonomously in the first place, unlike organisms. 2) The article's point is that not
by andars 10y ago
This doesn't strike me as a reasonable analogy.
1) Microchips don't grow autonomously in the first place, unlike organisms.
2) The article's point is that not only do humans have the "mask artwork and silicon wafers", but also the genes that other organisms use to regenerate portions of their body. A closer equivalence would be "the instructions on how to rebuild the missing half of the microchip from what remains".
- kazinator 10y agoMicrochips grow autonomously if you regard the entire fab and its staff as a big organism. And note that the blueprints for the chip do actually encode more or less what it looks like: as a genotype they resemble the phenotype. Yet such a repair is not feasible. DNA genes do not encode an arm or a leg directly, but a convoluted process by which the structure develops.
- guitarbill 10y ago> Yet such a repair is not feasible. Well, we don't really know, because we've never bothered to build a chip/fab process with that capability. It's cheaper to just throw broken ones away (edit: plus, it isn't morally reprehensible to throw them away because they don't have consciousness... yet). I guess the other thing is that a CPU is pretty simplistic compared to a big organism. We do bin products and then e.g. underclock or disable parts of them accordingly. So there's the start of an "injury"-sensing mechanism. But microchips still have a few thousand years to go in their "evolution" at least :)