单选题 . 
    Considering that the brain can be compared to the electronic computer, it may be useful to ask if one computer, the brain, has any advantages over the other, the electronic computer.
    First, compare the amount of energy needed to operate the brain and that needed to run a computer. It has been calculated that the entire brain runs on very little energy as compared with a machine. A machine with as great a capacity as the brain—assuming one could be built—would need at least one million times as much electrical power to continue operating.
    But the computer is a faster worker than the brain. The advanced calculators are thousands upon thousands of times faster than the brain, and models yet to be built will probably be yet speedier.
    Memory is of great importance in "Computer-type" operations. The number of bits of information that can be stored determines the ability of the system to do complex operations. The more bits stored, the more complex the calculations that can be made. In 1962, advanced electronic computers could store about 40,000 bits of information. Here, the brain shows its distinct advantages: although the number of bits stored is certainly not known, it has been estimated at many millions of bits.
    One specialist has said that to build a machine to imitate the capacity of the human brain, it would be necessary to make it the size of a very tall building. "The brain is like a computing machine, but there is no computing machine like the brain."
    Humans, however, may not continue to have this superiority in the future. Recent developments in electronic equipment, for example, Sceptron, have rapidly changed our ideas. Each Sceptron is extremely small, which may mean that is will soon be possible to make a calculator as complex as the human brain—with the same bit storage capacity—and be able to fit it neatly in a desk.
    There is one great and very important distinction between humans and machines. While electronic devices may think, "hunger" for electricity, and in other ways imitate animal and human behavior, men have desires, hungers, thirsts, and a complex existence of which the brain is a major, but not the entire, aspect. Human hopes and fears are not like those of the electronic mechanisms, nor will they be so long as we continue to construct thinking machines whose function is only to think as they are programmed.
    The use that man makes of automation, decision-making machines, and the other results of cybernetics is dependent on man himself. As Norbert Wiener states in his book The Human Use of Human Beings mankind is faced with two possible destructive directions in which cybernetics could develop, influencing all of society. One is that machines that do not learn will obey all instructions and never vary in their approach to problems. The other is that man may find himself in the position of someone who has released an angry force. Machines that can learn and make decisions on the basis of their learning are not obligated to decide in ways that please or improve humanity. Men cannot give machines responsibility for mankind; final choices must always be made by, and in favor of, men.1.  The energy needed to operate the human brain is ______ that needed to run a computer.