Interesting analogy, and I see your point.
What I'm trying to say is, we know that there's way to perform certain computations that's orders of magnitude more efficient than we've ever achieved. We have a working example of it. And yet, we choose to develop a wholly different technology, from scratch, that's unproven, instead of trying to emulate or understand what already have.
pjerem|3 years ago
Furthermore, i know it's a really common analogy but the brain is not really comparable to a computer. The brain is not programmable, it only have a single function which is "given x input, what output is more likely to keep the organism alive and well". It's a complex task, for sure.
But that's not a computer.
A computer is a machine on which you can run arbitrary programs. I can't plug some wires in your brain and program it to do what I want. It's not that the sockets for my wires are missing, it's just that the physical structure doesn't allow generic computing. If you really wanted to make an analogy, you could say that the brain is an electric circuit. You cannot program an electric circuit. It does what it's wired to do. You can't say that your electrical circuit is faster than a computer. It makes no sense.
So it's a false assumption to say that brains are faster than computers because it's just something that you cannot compare.
krisoft|3 years ago
But that is not true, is it? You take a person and train him/her the right way and you will get a fighter pilot, or an equestrian or a poet. The difference between your fingers and the fingers of the finest goldsmith or cellist is thousands of hours of practice. And that didn't change their fingers, it reprogrammed their brain.
So yeah, you can't upload a new program to it with a USB port, but it definitely can be programmed.