absurd hype for Sony's Playstation brand...

[Galaga will never die]

Is Sony paying for this stuff??

Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT [...] believes that today's youngsters may never have to die, and points to the rapid advances in computing power demonstrated last week, when Sony released the first details of its PlayStation 3.

It is 35 times more powerful than previous games consoles. 'The new PlayStation is 1 per cent as powerful as a human brain,' he said. 'It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain.'

link

[nukinetix]

I am not surprised - in fact, shock horror, I think he might be quite right.

Why are you so surprised?

p.s. According to current specs, if the bandwidth is sustainable and the 8 128bit cores in the CELL chip do not compromise each other when working in parallel, then there are at least 2-3 cases I can think of in which the PS3 would be over 1000 times faster than the PS2. What is more "scary" is that the cell processor is designed with extreme parallelism in mind, hence you could add as many of them as you want - I can see this being Sony's way of "upgrading" the PS3 in the near future at a low cost, something that Microsoft won't be able to do.

[Galaga will never die]

Maybe it wasn't exactly clear what I meant. It's the whole Playstation-12-will-make-you-immortal angle of the article I was referring to.

I can see the marketing taglines now...
"Why risk death? Upload your brain to your Playstation 12 online memory card. It's like a cheat code for your life!"

[RetroZelda88]

Maybe it wasn't exactly clear what I meant. It's the whole Playstation-12-will-make-you-immortal angle of the article I was referring to.

I can see the marketing taglines now...
"Why risk death? Upload your brain to your Playstation 12 online memory card. It's like a cheat code for your life!"

Well someday, once we reach those speed limits with the PS12. I can probably upload my entire soul onto a memory card and have my friends trade me in at Gamestop for $10. How cheap.

[nukinetix]

Maybe it wasn't exactly clear what I meant. It's the whole Playstation-12-will-make-you-immortal angle of the article I was referring to.

I can see the marketing taglines now...
"Why risk death? Upload your brain to your Playstation 12 online memory card. It's like a cheat code for your life!"

I know what you mean, I hate it when science and technology is popularised and oversimplified only so that everyone takes notice ... that does sound cheap, and you're right.

However it probably won't take a PS12 to do what you said (or something roughly equivalent) ... it WILL probably be a PS5, or PS6, not a PS12

And maybe it won't be advertised directly as "offering immortality" but as becoming your close buddy, maybe it won't even be a physical box (a "console") but simply a ubiquitous processing entity, decentralised, distributed over a number of things and non-things. Think of it as an augmentation of your subconscious thinking processes (when you come up with ideas or you remember something, an awful lot ... awful awful lot is happening inside your cranium, that "you" are not even remotely aware of ... yet the idea or the "thing" you try to remember - or sometimes don't even try to - pops up ... imagine PS5, or PS6 augmenting that "thought pipeline" somehow ... )

[Shane R. Monroe]

So much of this sort of thing has been prophecized in film.

See FREEJACK's "spiritual switchboard" for a real example of the soul-in-a-box scenario.

Don't worry - it won't get that far. Gaming is almost over as we know it. Holographic technology inside of virtual reality is the only leap that can save entertainment - and if you think we're all a bunch of brain-dead zombies NOW ... just wait until you can escape to a holodeck when life sucks. It will be the most powerful 'drug' on the planet ... people will kill and die for it. It will make the Crusades look like a light skirmish. I dare say the downfall of humanity ITSELF will begin when we get holodecks. Technology progresses ... the human race is slipping backwards. Technology gets better, people get more dumb in equal if NOT exponential proportions. Remember BATMAN FOREVER? "Your brain on the box"? There you go.

[devilshed]

"today's youngsters may never have to die"

He literally believes that?
Well, I see major problems with that. Only if murder is rampant could that work.

I think the highest count for a serial killer is 900 something by and Indian. He probably thought it was too crowded so he went to chopping.

[btribble]

"today's youngsters may never have to die"

They'll just be deleted. Or formatted. Or Hax0r3d.

Did anyone here see eXistenZ? Game consoles were portrayed as organic things that people hooked into their own systems. I thought it was kind of a neat idea, especially when one of the characters hooked themselves into a "sick" system. Don't know if I see that happening or not, but an interesting idea nonetheless.

[Galaga will never die]

Did anyone here see eXistenZ? Game consoles were portrayed as organic things that people hooked into their own systems. I thought it was kind of a neat idea

A wonderful movie, inspired in neat subtle ways by lots of underground gaming culture stuff at the time and projected into the future. It's also an unofficial sequel of sorts to Cronenberg's Videodrome

[yuckymucky]

The power as far as the hardware maybe getting there as far as paralleling the human brain but the software is not even close by any means. There are groups that have been working for years to try and map the human brain using grid nodes and have yet to even hit 1%. I just saw an article about it online today as soon as I can find it again I will post it up on here. Everything that is all powerful still has to be programmed sometime and we just don't have the skiils to do that yet.

I wouldn't worry too much about being able to upload yourself yet...but it will be comming some day. I will probably be dead by then.