Sir Clive Sinclair on future of computer intelligence; 1984

Sir Clive Sinclair, speaking in 1984, ponders on the future of computer development and artificial intelligence compared to the human brain. “One’s got to realise that the machines we have today, the computers of today, are superhuman in their ability to handle numbers and infantile, sub-infantile, in their ability to handle ideas and concepts. But there’s a new generation of machine coming along which’ll be quite different and the reason for the difference is a question of the number of elements in the machine. The human brain’s got something like ten thousand million cells and each of those and each of those is a pretty complex device in its’ own right, perhaps a thousand connections. So there’s literally billions of components in the human brain. Now a computer, wonderful as it may seem, is thousands, almost millions of times fewer number of components. It’s got a lot of components compared with the products we saw in the past but compared to the human brain, it’s still tiny. But there’s an explosion going on in the complexity of the machines we can make and by the Nineties, or certainly by the turn of the century, we will certainly be able to make a machine with as many parts, as complex as the human brain. Whether we will be able to make it do what a human brain does, at that stage, is quite another matter but once we’ve got something that complex, we’re well on the road to that.” (NBSF439W - AEVZ001J)