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The distinction between Computers and Humans is not as striking as one would initially assume it is. We conventionally say that a computer is a dumb aggregate of semiconductor devices that cant think on its own, and were right in saying so. The common general purpose computer does have to be programmed before we can expect anything out of it it needs to be told what its tasks are, what its constraints are, what it will get from us in the form of an input, and what it needs to compute as the output. At a very high level, a computer is just a machine that maps inputs to outputs subject to some constraints. Humans, on the other hand, are complex emotional beings that have much more going on inside of them, right? We have the capability to think; we have what is called free will. We can make decisions for ourselves, and then act upon those decisions. We can sense whatevers going on around us, and then decide what it is that we want to do. Our speech, actions, gestures etc. basically all forms of ways we interact with our environment and the people around us are shaped by what we see, touch, hear, feel, then interpret and process. At a very high level, humans factor in their surroundings, and based on laws, norms, and various religious, personal, and societal conventions, they act.

Come to think of it, that sounds an awful lot like just mapping inputs to outputs subject to certain constraints. My point is, there may be numerous arguments to be made against the whole concept of comparing Man to Machine, but at the micro-level, everything we do boils down to a decision problem that is sometimes influenced by external factors. Our lives are made of the very problems that computers have been taught how to handle. If you analyse each activity, you will find a striking similarity between said activity and some aspect of the rather vast field of computer science.

Say youre sitting at your desk working on a paper for school. Your stomach makes the characteristic dying whale sound. This is an Interrupt. Youre hungry. Decision point: do you get a snack, or do you finish off your work first. Your mind (consciously or otherwise) weighs in the pros and cons. It is anticipating the outcome and wants to act in the way that would be most beneficial to you, much like a Lookahead mechanism thats implemented in various computer-y contexts. Eventually your brain does a cost-benefit analysis and says:

The analogy doesnt end here. When youve decided to move between tasks, you need to do a Context Switch. You need to save the current state of your process so that you can get back to it and start off where you left. Itll take you some time to get in the zone again when youre back, much like the overhead that a processor has to bear.

Say, then, that you decide to make a sandwich. You check if you have all the ingredients by Searching through your pantry. You realise youre missing some sauces so you decide to drive to the store. Upon reaching, you look at the store map and mentally plot the Shortest Path to the aisle that has the sauces. When you cant find what you need, you Query an employee and they return with exactly what you need. At the checkout, the cashier says Thanks for shopping with us. You say You too. Oops! Cache Miss these werent the words you were looking for.

When you reach home, you cant seem to find your keys. Your house is Encrypted. Thankfully you remember your neighbours have your spare key for Redundancy. You ring their bell but nobody answers. You knock, and call out their name. They come out and say they had to cut off the bell connection because the neighbourhood kids would ring the bell and run away. What you just experienced was the aftermath of a Denial of Service attack

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Living an Algorithmic Life. The distinction between Computers and | by Jaskaran Singh Bhatia | The Startup | Feb, 2021 - Medium