“Every time we look at this, biology provides a clue as to how we should pursue the frontiers of computing,” said John E. And biology, scientists say, promises to contribute more than metaphors.
To meet the challenge, without gobbling the world’s energy supply, a different approach will be needed. These limits loom as demand is accelerating for computing capacity to make sense of a surge of new digital data from sensors, online commerce, social networks, video streams and corporate and government databases. Today’s chips are power hogs, running hot, which curbs how much of a chip’s circuitry can be used. Nanoscale circuits cannot shrink much further. The physical limits of conventional computer designs are within sight - not today or tomorrow, but soon enough. The shift in thinking results from advances in neuroscience and computer science, and from the prod of necessity. Yet the principles of biology are gaining ground as a tool in computing. As Frederick Jelinek, a pioneer in speech recognition, put it, “airplanes don’t flap their wings.”
Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit of artificial intelligence. As computers improved and became capable of some tasks familiar to humans, like playing chess, the term used was “artificial intelligence.” DNA, it is said, is the original software.įor the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that - a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. The first computers - room-size behemoths - were referred to as “giant brains” or “electronic brains,” in headlines and everyday speech. Ever since the early days of modern computing in the 1940s, the biological metaphor has been irresistible.
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