Characteristics: They have a central processing unit CPU, random access memory (RAM), and storage memory (hard disks), display units, keyboards, and a mouse. That's basically it.
Capabilities: Can run a set of pre-programmed instructions (software) that will perform calculations, display results, store results, search for patterns etc.
1.ability to perform certain login questions
2.ability to produce New Time Dimension
3.ability to control error
4.ability to check itself
Limitations: At this point in time, they cannot think on their own. However, the growth of capabilities is far faster than any human genetic growth of intelligence from fish to humans that took about 100 million years. The computer growth in raw processing power is orders of magnitude faster, and machines may ultimately survive humans, have more intelligence, gain it faster, evolve faster, and do more.
There is no reason to believe that the human species will survive any longer than other rapidly developing species with a self-destructive behavior, or survive a catastrophe, but machines may ultimately take over the world, then the solar system, and finally extend into the universe until entropy takes over in about another 15 billion years, and the universe ends as we know it.
So basically, there is no real limit to what computers can do as they are made more powerful, have more memory, and better software.
Stephen Hawking as given lectures on this and other subjects, as have many other scientists, it's not science fiction, it's simply projecting what will happen in the future given the rate of change over the past few hundred years, and especially the last 100 years.
Capabilities: Can run a set of pre-programmed instructions (software) that will perform calculations, display results, store results, search for patterns etc.
1.ability to perform certain login questions
2.ability to produce New Time Dimension
3.ability to control error
4.ability to check itself
Limitations: At this point in time, they cannot think on their own. However, the growth of capabilities is far faster than any human genetic growth of intelligence from fish to humans that took about 100 million years. The computer growth in raw processing power is orders of magnitude faster, and machines may ultimately survive humans, have more intelligence, gain it faster, evolve faster, and do more.
There is no reason to believe that the human species will survive any longer than other rapidly developing species with a self-destructive behavior, or survive a catastrophe, but machines may ultimately take over the world, then the solar system, and finally extend into the universe until entropy takes over in about another 15 billion years, and the universe ends as we know it.
So basically, there is no real limit to what computers can do as they are made more powerful, have more memory, and better software.
Stephen Hawking as given lectures on this and other subjects, as have many other scientists, it's not science fiction, it's simply projecting what will happen in the future given the rate of change over the past few hundred years, and especially the last 100 years.
