Having said this, I would venture to say that the fish hasn't invented the fish tank of bowl or even the canon used to launch horny adult salmon upstream because they're way too dumb. In fact, the next closest thing to the fish bowl in terms of tools usage by a non-human species is a stick chimps use to dig ants out of a nest. Let's get this clear for the sake of understanding. While goldfish have been given a bad reputation about having 6 second memories, which to the best of my knowledge they do not, the goldfish still lost to a stick. By human standards, a goldfish's IQ would be so low that it would not only be technically be considered profoundly retarded, but if anyone were to do what the goldfish does (stare at things all day and blow bubbles), they would be declared dead*. And that is why computers will never take over the world.
[abrupt segway]
If one considers the intricacy of a modern day cpu, the kind one finds at bestbuy, they will soon find that although it may do quite well the things it is designed to do (facebook and the obligatory Crysis on full), it does not at all do anything else. A quad-core i7 has about 1,400,000,000 transistors. How much of that is taken up to manage the "autonomic" parts of the computer, such as running the fans, managing the power supply, etc? Honestly, not too much. In fact, barely any. However, for the goldfish, a significant portion of it's neurons are taken up in moving the tail to stay afloat or getting water to run over its gills. It does this, but on a higher level. It's vision is better than Microsoft kinect, it's homeostasis is better than the temp monitor in a laptop, and it's much better at finding food than a computer is at finding electricity. Well then what about the rest of the Cpu that's running your video games and social networks? Well, what does a goldfish do besides stay alive? One simple thing. It makes decisions. Now from experience, I'm sure we can all agree that the ability to make a decision does not make you smart (*cough, politicians*). However, the ability to make forward thinking, decisive, and effective decisions does. And it's quite clear, that if a goldfish were not capable of making such decisions, it would be extinct. I am indeed now implying that a computer can not make such decisions, and it is an implication with intention. Surely, someone out there is thinking of an objection that somewhat follows the lines of "Oh, but a goldfish just follows its programming too. It gets stimulus, and reacts to it according it's instincts and what not." I don't know much about programming, but from the amount I've gathered by osmosis from my compsci friends, I think I can reasonably say that the way programming works is that a computer is told what to do in the event of what. Basically, conditions are described, and a response is coded for it. Imagine now, if you had to code for the life of a wild goldfish. Could you make it swim in a straight line? Probably. Curves? Yeah. Okay, could you have it recognize the outline of the shadow of a predator and be alert but not alarmed because it might just ignore you but surreptitiously position yourself for a fight or flight response wherein all the muscles in your body will aid you in the preservation of your life and you're shutting down digesting lunch because that's not needed right now so all the enzymes need to be reduced as much as possible which relies really on what you had, but at the same time the heart rate is going up and everything is getting tense because here comes a huge fish and you're just a stupid goldfish oh and this all has to happen in an instant because there's no loading screen on the food chain? I'd say that's a bit more of a challenge. But surely, at some point, the computer could get so smart that it programs itself, right? Goldfish do that too. It's called guess and check. The ones that guess wrong get checked by something that thinks it's delicious. In short, a computer doesn't make decisions concerning it's wellbeing and preservation. Should you try to code it to, the world's best effort will still fall short of the decision making power of a orange sliver the size of your thumb sold in plastic bags at the county fair.
And with all their computational prowess, the goldfish still can't figure out how to put together a freaking fish bowl. What chance then does the computer have at taking over the world? If a goldfish makes a braindead vegetable of a human, then a computer surely would make a dead dead rock of one. Now according to Moore's law, the day is quickly approaching where there will be computers with as many transistors as a human has neurons, but still it will only be able to do what it has been told to do. Indeed, the aforementioned intel core has more transistors than an adult zebra fish has neurons (I tried to look up the number for the goldfish, but wikipedia declined to share that information). In light of this, it's safe to assume that the intricacy of life lay not in the algorithmic complexity of the some brainiac processor, but rather in how it works. According to Neil deGrasse Tyson, there are about the same number of neurons in the human brain as there are stars in the galaxy, so I daresay that computers have a lot of catching up to do.
*In some countries, being braindead constitutes being totally dead
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