Found a great entry on Tom’s site today where he comments on Paul Graham’s excellent Great Hackers essay. I haven’t managed to find time to read the essay but Tom’s post about office space makes a good point. I also strongly believe in having a nice quiet space when one wants to concentrate on ‘hard problems’ or even when trying to follow a train of thought to conclusion. Being interrupted at times like these leads to a huge loss in productivity as you have to context switch for however long is necessary to do something else and when you return to the task at hand you might find it difficult to continue where you were interrupted. It’s not like you can simply change the Instruction Pointer in the brain like you can in computer memory to simply resume execution where it left off
If you read Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines you’ll see that he is right when he states that brain neurons basically waste a lot of processing power not calculating, but sustaining body functions. So when a positronic brain is eventually constructed with equal computing capacity to the brain it will function much more effectively at computation as electronic circuits are a million times faster than neurons. Remember though that this “being” or whatever it may be will also have to devote a portion of it’s processing power to maintaining itself. Still, in the end it would be a lot more efficient.