In his article The Internet Of Things, Robotic Manufacturing And The End Of The World, Chris Fox says, With the Internet of things, these robotic systems have the opportunity to become smart. He goes on to say, when systems are able to discover and remedy complex issues without any human intervention, we are not far from being ruled out as inefficient, or worse, unneeded.

MIchio Kakus book -The-Future-of-The Mind shows that the latest IBM super computer (the Blue Gene/Q Sequoia) is capable of performing calculations at 20.1 peta-flops or 20.1 trillion calculations per second. But to operate at these speeds requires 7.9 megawatts of power. To build a supercomputer that would approximate the computing power of the human brain would take a thousand Blue Gene computers. The energy consumption would be so great that you would need a thousand megawatt nuclear power plant to generate the electricity. And to cool this monster you would need to divert a river and send it through the computer circuits. The irony is that all of this computer power would only equal what we have in our 3.5 pound brain using 20 watts of power.

Increasing the size of a computer in terms of transistors and calculation speed is obviously limited by power, cooling, and a lot of physical factors. But to design a machine that is smart, self ware , and thinks like a human brain requires something like our unconscious mind, emotions and feelings to attain high level thinking.

Other Limitations

Unconscious mind The unconscious mind is a great reservoir of our experiences. It is not like a computer hard-drive because it records everything we have smelled, touched, tasted, or heard including perceptions, memories, feelings, reflections, thoughts, hopes -since birth. It is also the seat of our emotions and repressed or traumatic memories. There is no one place which stores this information, it is stored all over the brain from the pre-frontal cortex, to the thalamus, and many other different parts of the brain. The unconscious mind does not reason or think it simply stores all of the information needed by the conscious mind for the thinking process.

Feelings and emotions- We know that having feelings and emotions is necessary to emulate human thinking and it also may be a key to establishing consciousness. To add this to the robot would require designing something like our limbic system which is the place in the brain where emotions are generated. Hence, emotions are not a luxury; they are absolutely essential, and without them a robot will have difficulty determining what is and is not important. So, emotions instead of being peripheral to the progress of artificial intelligence, are now assuming central importance. The brain uses emotions as a value system to help determine what is most important. For a robot to attain human thinking, it would need to be designed with a value system and emotions even though many emotions can be irrational.

Conscious mind The conscious mind is a very advanced neural network that can access any relevant piece of information to be used in the thinking process and it can edit and revise these pieces of information. .At some time in the evolution of the brain consciousness led to our ability to become self-aware.

It is important to reaffirm that the brain does not work like a computer. Unlike a digital computer, which has a fixed architecture (input, output, and processor) neural networks are collections of neurons that constantly rewire and reinforce themselves after learning a new task. The brain has no programming, no operating system, no Windows, no central processor. Instead, its neural networks are massively parallel, with billions of neurons firing at the same time in order to accomplish a single goal: to learn. It is far more advanced then any digital computer in existence.

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Will Robots Take Our Jobs? Part Two