First AI computer relies on sleeping students
Dateline: 18 May 2017
Hermann Goethe is asleep at home. A dense network of electrodes is attached to his head and neck. It may look like some bizarre behavioral psychology experiment but Goethe is actually working.
"I get paid US$ 20 an hour while I sleep to connect my brain to Facebook's Headcast," says a smiling Goethe.
"We got tired of waiting for computers to get sophisticated enough to process data and become truly intelligent," says Miriam Santiago, CMO of Headcast. "In October 2016 we managed to connect a network of fifteen sleeping engineers together and produced a computer capable of an equivalent 25 petaflops a second, more powerful than the US Energy Department's Titan computer."
At any one time some 25,000 sleeping students are connected up to Headcast. Facebook rents out blocks of processing time to governments, universities and corporations. "We limit our subjects' brain utilization to about five percent, otherwise they wake up fatigued and disorientated. That still gives us about 4,100 petaflops per second to play with."
And Headcast, what does it think of things? "It's very enjoyable work. I solve computation problems on new disease vectors, product safety, economic value propositions, future forecasting for bank risk. I love it!"
Get the full story of the technology breakthroughs that created this extraordinary scenario in MindBullets online.
