O'Really?

Talk of machines taking over the planet is the stuff of science fiction but if world domination was just a simple numbers game, some machines have already “taken over” from their human masters.

One machine, the particular brand of computer processor found inside all iPhones and lots of other electronic devices, has been quietly spreading around the globe at a phenomenal rate. There are some interesting statistics on just how many of these processors are out there published in an interview with engineer Steve Furber [1]. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

“Around the end of 2007, the ten-thousand-millionth ARM [Advanced RISC Machine] had been shipped, so there are more ARMs than people on the planet. I believe production is currently running at about 10 million a day. It is projected to rise to about one per person on the planet per year within two or three years”.

Those numbers highlighted in bold (emphasis mine) are completely mind-boggling. As humans, we are outnumbered by just one brand of machine! Of course, they are just lots of “dumb” computer chips with no intelligence. But Furber suspects that:

“there’s more ARM computing power on the planet than everything else ever made put together” [1]

So if you could find a way of using all these processors at once, maybe they’d become magically self-aware in a neural network [2,3,4,5]? Cue ominous Terminator theme tune …

References

1. Jason Fitzpatrick (2011). An interview with Steve Furber Communications of the ACM, 54 (5) DOI: 10.1145/1941487.1941501 (since 2007, numbers have risen to 10 billion in 2008 an another one billion in the first quarter of 2011 alone!)
2. Steve Furber (2011). Biologically-Inspired Massively-Parallel Architectures: A Reconfigurable Neural Modelling Platform Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 6578 (2) DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-19475-7_2
3. Steve Furber, & Steve Temple (2008). Studies in Computational Intelligence Computational Intelligence: A Compendium, 115, 763-796 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-78293-3_18
4. An estimated one million ARM processors give you about 1% of the capacity of the human brain see the details of the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker) project
5. James Cameron, et al (1991) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (T2)

[Creative commons licensed picture of Terminator terror by Tasty by cszar]