18 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? Each time a new advance in technology is made, people use it to explain the working of the brain. The ancient Greeks thought the brain was a fire consuming oxygen. When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, the nervous system resembled a maze of wires and the brain an exchange. Brains were obviously a sophisticated telephone system. This idea has some potentially frightening consequences, particularly in light of the speed at which computers are improving. The most striking feature of computer technology is the rate of development. Cars travel faster than a person’s legs will carry them, machines manufacture things faster than our hands are capable of working. If brains are computers, surely it is just a matter of time before they will think faster than humans. Turing predicted this would happen when computers reached the level of storing around 10 billion units of information. This happened some time in mid-2000. But today, in the year 2014, I can report that although my computer can beat me at chess, it still cannot fill out my expense report for me. So I am still ahead! Maybe Turing just got the mathematics wrong. The human brain has about 10,000 times more neurons than our most powerful computers have logic gates. By this calculation, it’s not a billion units of storage we need but, a trillion trillion units to put the computer on a par with a human brain. It’s just a matter of time! The worrying thing - especially for fans of the ‘computers taking over the world’ science fiction genre — is that computers are improving exponentially fast in line with Moores Law, and the parity point is coming soon. Gordon Moore founded Intel with Andy Grove, and ran the engineering department there for more than 20 years. According to Moore's Law, the power of a computer doubles approximately every 18 months. The next significant event in the computer versus human competition is the gate count parity point — the moment when the numbe