“We have all become computation-centric over the last few years. We’ve tended to think that computation explains everything. When I was a kid, I had a book which described the brain as a telephone-switching network. Earlier books described it as a hydrodynamic system or a steam engine. Then in the ’60s it became a digital computer. In the ’80s it became a massively parallel digital computer. I bet there’s now a kid’s book out there somewhere which says that the brain is just like the World Wide Web because of all of its associations. We’re always taking the best technology that we have and using that as the metaphor for the most complex things—the brain and living systems. And we’ve done that with computation.” — Rodney Brooks (link from edge.org)
