I was driving down the road yesterday thinking about what I should write this week. It wasn't until I had made a left turn and was cruising down the next street that it hit me … I didn’t remember taking that turn! But I took it … correctly! I was amazed. Now maybe little things amaze me but hear me out here.
Without conscious thought: I sat behind another car, I accelerated when the light turned green, I turned the wheel the correct way, I stayed within the lines of the road, I didn’t run into the car in front of me or beside me, I braked and accelerated at all the appropriate times; all of this without even realizing it. What amazes me is the capacity of our brains to learn and adapt to situations and train it self to do what it needs to do. One hundred years ago our brains didn’t even conceive of doing the stuff it is doing now – like driving cars and using cell phones or putting on makeup at the same time, all the while listening to our favorite songs, and worrying about getting to work on time.
On the farm in Indiana one of my jobs was picking up eggs from our 5000 chickens. That was over 30 years ago and I still can hold 3 eggs in one hand AND tell which end of the egg has the point that needed to go down in the flat. (Didn’t know eggs had a point did you? Well check them out next time; we were required to put the point down in the flat so they would not crack as easy.) So I would pick up the eggs, three in each hand, feeling for the point, put them in the flat, and all the while singing my own concert of memorized songs for the chickens.
That is why computers have not yet reached the capacity of humans in computing. They will someday be better at us in memory capacity, better in never needing rest and some other areas. But computers will never match our creative and adaptive abilities – because we have not reached the peak of our creative and adaptive abilities, they constantly change, adapt and create. Some of us call that being made in God’s image.