http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,87554,00.html
Article with two salient points of interest. One revolves around the ever-increasing capability of malware, which will only increase as hardware and software powers increase. That the bad guys appear to be winning the war suggests this pessimistic take has a lot of merit.
But hidden away on the second page of this article is an arresting little chart, which shows the date at which a computer implemented the processing power of some living organism. For example, the processing power equivalent of a bacterium was available in 1975. I was under the vague impression that we were at the insect level today, but according to this, we passed lizard equivalency in 2000, and are making strides towards the capacity of the average mouse.
While human capacities are nearly two decades away, according to this [and I suspect 'the devil is in the details', and the timespan may be longer than that], just imagine something considerably lesser -- a computer system with the responsiveness and processing power of a dog. Such a level of achievement would itself be a massive upgrade in the ability to use computers as a tool, and would be made even more impressive if we could teach such computers not to make a mess indoors....
Posted by jho at December 16, 2003 02:12 PM