Differences between humans and computers. In humans, only the highest levels of the brain are directly and quickly reprogrammable. In computers, every level of the machine is directly and quickly reprogrammable. Is there an advantage to the limitations of the human brain? Yes. Try holding your breath indefinitely, by only controlling your breathing from your brain but keeping your mouth and nose unobstructed, for example. Eventually, you’ll go unconscious, but when you do, you’ll start breathing again. Ah ha! Your lower levels of your brain knew that you were foolish, O pie-in-the-sky conscious intelligent being.
On the other hand, take this example. You’re sticking your hands inside of a tight computer case that was recently turned on. You happen to touch one of the heads of a high voltage capacitor and you get shocked. Your nervous system causes you to jerk indiscriminately and your hand rams up against a sharp metal edge inside the computer case and you get severely cut. Was that an intelligent thing to do? Of course not, but the low levels of your body could not have known any better.
And what about computers. Bricking. So, there are both advantages and disadvantages to both systems, but the cases are different. Computers are optimized to satisfy commercial and political demands with the current state-of-the-art of technology, whereas humans evolved to have a long-lasting idiot-resistant bodies for general danger cases and scenarios. Howver, for cool new innovations and short-lived technologies, the human body does not attempt to adapt to those things at the innate level. After all, the technologies will be short-lived, and any biological memory advantageous to them will soon become obsolete in future generations. Have it both ways.
Whereas for computers, the obsolescence is embodied in physical hardware changes. Computers are inherently short-lived, so it makes sense to design short-term advantages directly into the hardware, whereas humans are long-lived. At present, no computer system has proved a formidable long-term life record, those 8-bit and 16-bit embedded systems are breaking ground in this field.
Neuroscientists are working on documenting the hardware interface to the memory circuits of the human brain, or at least in part to be able to successfully create computer memory prosthetics.
Perhaps the differences are more important than the similarities. But the biggest difference of all, is that there’s a much bigger economy behind learning about computers than there is behind learning about the human brain. There’s so many more employers willing to pay you good money if you’ve studied computers well. That being said, people of the future will tend to study computers first, and the human brain second, primarily through their study of computers as they see fit. As a matter of fact, that’s part of the reason why early brain researchers didn’t make as much progress as they do today. Computers come first in today’s economy. They channel and control the world’s economic flow.