@Zuma That’s close to how I feel things are ordered as well. Call it “The Force” if you like, in Star Wars fashion.
The Cray XT5 Jaguar Supercomputer is a network of 19,000 machines with 224,256 cores each having 300 million transistors. That amounts to 12.7 quintillion neural connections, or roughly 10,000 times the number of neurons in a human brain. It performs 1.75 petaflops. That’s 1.75 thousand trillion floating point operations per second.
The XT5 is connected to the Internet, letting it access all the knowledge, conjecture and absolute bunk known to man. It’s network connections give it “eyes” wherever there is an network connected camera and “ears” wherever there is a network connected microphone. It can even see into space and through radar and sonar. And yet it can’t program itself, and we can.
And it’s not just an issue of living neurons being of superior design. Whales, orcas and elephants all have more neurons in their brains than we do, and they can’t yet break out of their instinctual programming either. They are not aware of being aware.
It’s a fascinating puzzle why we, with such relatively limited computational power, have uniquely become self aware. Perhaps the Universe willed it to be so. If so, shouldn’t we wonder why?