I believe the ethicalness came from religious concerns.... I guess it may no longer be a secret, as this was about 6 years ago I heard this and I just found this article containing similar info to what I had heard...
Yoohoo, Mr Moderator...Anti-Plagerism Banner found here...
Portions of atricle posted here are taken from:
http://www.megafoundation.org/UltraHIQ/HIQNews/Machine_Intelligence_Sort.htm
Incredible Complexity and Storage Capacity:
It is hard not to wax eloquent when describing the construction and the capabilities of the human brain. From a purely computational point of view, your brain may be one to two orders of magnitude faster and more complex then the upcoming 1 teraflops Cray T3E or Intel Touchstone supercomputers, or perhaps 100,000 to 1,000,000 times more elaborate than the new 200 MHz Intel P6 personal computer. Your brain contains about 50 billon to 100 billion neurons (nobody knows how many for sure), each of which interfaces with 1,000 to 100,000 other neurons through 100 trillion (1014) to 10,000 trillion (1016) synaptic junctions[6]. Each synapse possesses a variable firing threshold that is reduced if the neuron is repeatedly activated. If we assume that the firing threshold at each synapse can assume 256 distinguishable levels, and if we suppose that there are 20,000 shared synapses per neuron (10,000 per neuron), then the total information storage capacity of the synapses in the cortex would be of the order of 500 to 1,000 (1015) terabytes. (Of course, if the brain's storage of information takes place at a molecular level, then I would be afraid to hazard a guess regarding how many bytes can be stored in the brain. One estimate has placed it at about 3.6 X 1019 bytes.)
Not bad for a 3-pound gob of pink goo!
Because of the neural-net organization of the brain and the high degree of redundancy that appears to characterize neural-net based memories, the effective storage capacity of the brain may be much less than 500 terabytes of computer memory. My considerations of our memory capacity suggest that its computer-equivalent storage size may lie closer to 500 gigabytes than to 500 terabytes. (The brain's storage capacity may primarily be used for other purposes than the retention of facts.)
Accuracy and Redundancy:
A considerable degree of redundancy in cranial memory storage may be needed to accommodate for the quantum unreliability of the brain's nanocircuitry. (The synaptic junctions are characterized by separations that are less than 100 Å.)
Complexity of Cerebral Functions
The English philosopher John Locke thought that a newborn was a "tabula rasa"?a blank slate?upon which the world wrote whatever it wrote. As recently as fifty years ago, it was thought that the cerebral cortex was a structure-less, pink pudding of identical neurons that somehow simply and magically produced human thought. The underlying cerebral hemispheres were known to have certain specialized functions?the left temporal lobe mediated speech while the occipital lobe specialized in vision?but memories seemed to be distributed throughout the brain. There was speculation concerning why 90% of all brain tissue was never used, together with the idea that some day, we might be able to learn to harness it. Today, we understand that the brain is highly structured and highly specialized. A great many functions are "wired in", compared to a digital computer which is truly a blank slate. It is these "wired in" functions that make us get out of bed in the morning rather than spend the day estivating. The 90% of brain tissue that was thought to be unused probably is used. Unlike many man-made machines which either work or don't work, certain brain functions degrade gracefully rather than abruptly as brain tissue is destroyed.
Experience with biological systems in general shows that they are exceedingly complicated, with multiple backup systems. My consideration of the functions of the mind suggests that it is also extremely complicated. The brain apparently contains a multitude of very complex and highly-specialized areas which we probably haven't yet fully mapped out and or understood.
Speed:
Neurons require about a millisecond to discharge, followed by a 4 millisecond refractory period That could amount to as many as 2 X 1018 connection updates per second. In practice, the firing rate and the synaptic count probably isn't that high. There are 40 Hertz firing waves that sweep the entire brain from back to front. The 6,000,000,000 neurons in the visual cortex also fire about 40 times a second to give us our 20-frame-per-second visual update rate, so we might be looking at perhaps 240 billion firings per second in the visual cortex. Each neuron connects to a number of other neurons through dendrites and an axon (an average of 15,000 interconnections per neuron in the visual cortex), so we might be dealing with about 50 trillion (5 X 1013) synaptic junctions in the visual cortex. At 40 firings a second, the visual cortex should be able to perform about 2 quadrillion synaptic activations per second?2 X 1015 connection updates per second or 2,000,000 Gcups (giga-connection-updates-per-second?compared to 10 Gcups for current neural networks. For the brain as a whole, assuming 10,000 interconnections per neuron, the number might be about 10 times this amount, or 20,000,000 Gcups. (A recent 3/17/96 article in Parade magazine places the total synaptic count at 1.5 quadrillion and the connection update rate at 10,000,000 Gcups.)
It has been estimated that computational speeds of 109 calculations per second (1 Gigops) would be required to match the edge and motion detection capabilities of the first four layers of the human retina, and 1013 operations per second (10,000 Gigops) to 1016 operations per second (10,000,000 Gigops) would be necessary to emulate what is done in the brain overall[7].
The Brain Needs So Little Power:
Still another impressive parameter regarding the brain is how little power it dissipates (of the order of 100 watts). By comparison, a 500-MIPS (500-Million Instructions Per Second) DEC Alpha chip dissipates about 50 watts. Using 20,000 DEC Alpha chips, we would need a 1,000 kw behemoth to achieve the lower threshold of 10,000 Gigops, or about 20,000 times as much power....
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