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I agree with you 95%. The 5% being an admittedly far fetched and idyllic notion that just maybe one day we will design the mythical x86 bacterium and all of a s
by tacotime 12y ago
I agree with you 95%. The 5% being an admittedly far fetched and idyllic notion that just maybe one day we will design the mythical x86 bacterium and all of a sudden instead of needing meticulously crafted silicone wafers and logic gates... all of a sudden all we need is cheap simple hydrocarbon to grow the world's most elaborate super computers. They wouldn't be faster but more efficient and highly parallel. Like a more distributed version of a brain where bacterial (or whatever) cells take the place of traditional neurons.
- _almosnow 12y agoHaha, the x86 bacterium. I've been looking for that term for so long.
- aetherson 12y agoWhile it's true that there's an unlikely but nice scenario in which it becomes ultra-cheap to make biological processors, I take some issue with the idea of them being "highly parallel." What stops us from using more highly parallel chips right now is not the expense of silicon, it's that it turns out that highly parallel chips just aren't as useful as fast chips. Nothing about the ultra-cheap biological computers scenario would change that. That would be a world of omnipresent computing, not one of parallel computing.