Writing

Don't waste your processing resources

Published 4 years ago · Updated 2 years ago

The topic of humans, machines and its similarities always fascinated me. Not only leading to understand both worlds better but to see how they can complement each other in the best way possible.

Recently I thought about what happens if my computer crashes and discovered a weird similarly between me as a dying human and a crashing computer.

So, what does a computer do in it's relatively short lifetime?

Computers get built, then uses resources to process data and outputs the resulting data to its hard drive or another storage.

The human pretty much does the same job: It uses resources to live, then takes a bunch of data from its sensors and outputs the processed data to other humans, books or Wikipedia.

Dying means to both entities the same: If they didn't save the data to a remote location, all the computation resources is lost, because it's not passed on so eventually others can further work with it.

Humans are a little bit like computers. If they don't upload anything back into their network and die, all their gathered and processed data is lost, including all the processing energy they put into it.

Fruther reading

  • Tom Cleveland explains in a funny way why creating has more value to him than consuming. (Blogpost)