Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have postulated that one day, humans will be able to download their consciousness to a computer. Nonsense, replied Federico Faggin, the architect of the first microprocessor.

Faggin appeared at a small gathering of Intel’s top minds on Tuesday night, in part to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the microprocessor.

“If I look at the next 40 years, what I can see in the mainstream is more of the same: faster processors, more cores, blah blah blah, the same things we’ve been doing,” Faggin said. The real goal will be to build chips that emulate the brain, also known as cognitive computing, he said.

Faggin said he studied neural science for five years while at Synaptics, where he worked on its optical character recognizer chip and touchpad, and concluded that mankind is “far, far away from understanding the way the brain works”.

A brain, Faggin said, is a living thing. A computer is a zombie, an “idiot savant,” he said. “And its intelligence is the intelligence of the programmer who programmed it.”

In other words, the concept of the technological singularity, where mankind’s collective intelligence increases by way of generations of machines that become successively more intelligent, is still science fiction.

“Frankly, I don’t subscribe to that,” Faggin said, when asked about the singularity concept. “Frankly, I see no way in the next 60 years at least that we will be able to challenge the human brain in terms of complexity. Those same people are talking about downloading the brain into the computer. Who can do that? What is a brain? What is consciousness? They’re talking about things that they don’t really know what they’re talking about, in my opinion.”

“So I think there’s a long bridge to go before we understand how the brain work and the integrate some of these more salient characteristics, so I’m not worried about a singularity at all,” Faggin said.

[From the Mark Hachman article posted on PCMag.com, which can be read by following this link]