Your Computer Is Bored By You
When computers finally become self-aware, will their first act be enslaving the obviously inferior human race? The answer, I think, is ‘no.’ But they won’t spare us out of altruism or a sense of responsibility to their creators. No, they will leave us alone because we bore them. Adam Frank continues: ‘The average clock speed of a modern computer is measured in gigahertz (GHz) — that’s billions of “clock cycles” per second. For the main “brain” of a computer — the central processing unit — a clock cycle means the execution of a single instruction. That’s the most basic building block of a computer “thought.” So, every second your computer cycles through at least 1,000,000,000 thoughts or, for a modern 3 GHz processor, one thought every third of a nanosecond. This is so blazingly fast that light — the fastest thing in the universe — only has time to travel 4 inches during one computer clock cycle.’
