Often you might have heard the comments like 'Think outside the box'. Actually, can we as humans think outside the box? For many thousands of years, we believed earth was flat not a sphere/ellipsoid. Similarly, we believed earth is the center of universe and planets/stars including sun were rotating earth (might have mentioned this before). May be someone could say we were not intelligent and connected as we are at present. Then i would like to ask another question. What comes to your mind if you were asked to think of a computer? Guessing at present (when I'm writing this) the answer from an average person might be closely falling within these: transistor, chips, desktop computer, laptops, cpu, servers, data center, smart phones, smart devices etc. Next in line would say super computers and quantum computers. In theory all the current digital computers process in bits (form of 0s and 1s) while quantum computer process in qubits (more states than 0s and 1s to simplify).
Now comes to our real hero which is our own brain which process information more complex than bits/qubits. As per our current stats no super computer/quantum computer can match a single brain. But of course, it can do complex of faster processing of structured data, complex mathematical calculations, repetitive tasks etc. Still it is not smart enough to match human brain. For example, it is said to have 100000 chemical reactions happening in brain each second, with unlimited storage capacity and close to 100 billion neurons etc. All these coming from an object which is 3 pounds (1.3k kilograms) and generates 20 watts approx. (energy generated by a regular led bulb). On the contrary a powerful super computer consumes 30 megawatts approx. and close quantum computer counterpart will consume approx. 25 kW.
A brain (similar to humans) but the size of our bedroom is enough to outsmart entire planet. Why didn't anyone think of this when asked about computers? Maybe it time for us to rethink computers, and definitely not so out of the box!