A computer is a general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. In the past twenty years, there has been a dramatic increase in the processing speed of computers, network capacity and the speed of the Internet. These advances have paved the way for the revolution of fields such as quantum physics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.
A computer is a general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. In the past twenty years, there has been a dramatic increase in the processing speed of computers, network capacity and the speed of the Internet. These advances have paved the way for the revolution of fields such as quantum physics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.
A computer is a general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. In the past twenty years, there has been a dramatic increase in the processing speed of computers, network capacity and the speed of the Internet. These advances have paved the way for the revolution of fields such as quantum physics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.
A computer is a general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a set of
arithmetic or logical operations automatically.
By Chris Herzog Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006 In the past twenty years, there has been a dramatic increase in the processing speed of computers, network capacity and the speed of the internet. These advances have paved the way for the revolution of fields such as quantum physics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. These advances will have a profound effect on the way we live and work, the virtual reality we see in movies like the Matrix, may actually come true in the next decade or so. NANOCOMPUTERS Scientists are trying to use nanotechnology to make very tiny chips, electrical conductors and logic gates. Using nanotechnology, chips can be built up one atom at a time and hence there would be no wastage of space, enabling much smaller devices to be built. Using this technology, logic gates will be composed of just a few atoms and electrical conductors (called nanowires) will be merely an atom thick and a data bit will be represented by the presence or absence of an electron. A component of nanotechnology, nanocomputing will give rise to four types of nanocomputers: Electronic nanocomputers Chemical and Biochemical nanocomputers Mechanical nanocomputers Quantum nanocomputers Electronic nanocomputers Eletronic nanocomputers are created through microscopic circuits using nanolithography. [Nanocomputers] Chemical and Biochemical nanocomputers The interaction between different chemicals and their structures is used to store and process information in chemical nanocomputers. In order to create a chemical nanocomputer, engineers need to be able to control individual atoms and molecules so that these atoms and molecules can be made to perform controllable calculations and data storage tasks. Mechanical nanocomputers A mechanical nanocomputer uses tiny mobile components called nanogears to encode information. Some scientists predict that such mechanical nanocomputers will be used to control nanorobots. Quantum nanocomputers A quantum nanocomputer store data in the form of atomic quantum states or spin. Single-electron memory (SEM) and quantum dots are examples of this type of technology. Humanizing Nanocomputers Apart from this, scientists aim to use nanotechnology to create nanorobotsthat will serve as antibodies that can be programmed. This will help to protect humans against pathogenic bacteria and viruses that keep mutating rendering many remedies ineffective against new strains. Nanorobots would overcome this problem by reprogramming selectively to destroy the new pathogens. Nanorobots are predicted to be part of the future of human medicine.
SPRAY-ON NANO COMPUTERS Consider that research is being done at the Ediburgh University to create "spray-on computers the size of a grain of sand that will transform information technology. The research team aims to achieve this goal within four years. When these nanocomputers are sprayed on to the chests of coronary patients, the tiny cells record a patients health and transmit information back to a hospital computer. This would enable doctors to monitor heart patients who are living at home. QUANTUM COMPUTERS A quantum computer uses quantum mechanical phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition to process data. Quantum computation aims to use the quantum properties of particles to represent and structure data. Quantum mechanics is used to understand how to perform operations with this data. The quantum mechanical properties of atoms or nuclei allow these particles to work together as quantum bits, or qubits. These qubits work together to form the computer's processor and memory. Qubits can interact with each other while being isolated from the external environment and this enables them to perform certain calculations much faster than conventional computers. By computing many different numbers simultaneously and then interfering the results to get a single answer, a quantum computer can perform a large number of operations in parallel and ends up being much more powerful than a digital computer of the same size. "In the tiny spaces inside atoms, the ordinary rules of reality ... no longer hold. Defying all common sense, a single particle can be in two places at the same time. And so, while a switch in a conventional computer can be either on or off, representing 1 or 0, a quantum switch can paradoxically be in both states at the same time, saying 1 and 0.... Therein lies the source of the power." Whereas three ordinary switches could store any one of eight patterns, three quantum switches can hold all eight at once, taking "a shortcut through time." [Scientific America.com] Quantum computers could prove to be useful for running simulations of quantum mechanics. This would benefit the fields of physics, chemistry, materials science, nanotechnology, biology and medicine because currently, advancement in these fields is limited by the slow speed of quantum mechanical simulations. Quantum computing is ideal for tasks such as cryptography, modeling and indexing very large databases. Many government and military funding agencies are supporting quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE The term Artificial Intelligence was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a branch of computer science that aims to make computers behave like humans. [Artificial Intelligence] Artificial Intelligence includes programming computers to make decisions in real life situations (e.g. some of these expert systems help physicians in the diagnosis of diseases based on symptoms), programming computers to understand human languages (natural language), programming computers to play games such as chess and checkers (games playing), programming computers to hear, see and react to other sensory stimuli(robotics) and designing systems that mimic human intelligence by attempting to reproduce the types of physical connections between neurones in the human brain (neural networks). Natural-language processing would allow ordinary people who dont have any knowledge of programming languages to interact with computers. So what does the future of computer technology look like after these developments? Through nanotechnology, computing devices are becoming progressively smaller and more powerful. Everyday devices with embedded technology and connectivity are becoming a reality. Nanotechnology has led to the creation of increasingly smaller and faster computers that can be embedded into small devices.
This has led to the idea of pervasive computing which aims to integrate software and hardware into all man made and some natural products. It is predicted that almost any items such as clothing, tools, appliances, cars, homes, coffee mugs and the human body will be imbedded with chips that will connect the device to an infinite network of other devices. [Pervasive Computing] Hence, in the future network technologies will be combined with wireless computing, voice recognition, Internet capability and artificial intelligence with an aim to create an environment where the connectivity of devices is embedded in such a way that the connectivity is not inconvenient or outwardly visible and is always available. In this way, computer technology will saturate almost every facet of our life. What seems like virtual reality at the moment will become the human reality in the future of computer technology. http://www.geeks.com/techtips/2006/techtips-26nov06.htm What Is the Future of Computers?
By Natalie WolchoverSeptember 11, 2012 9:17 AM
. View photo Integrated circuit from an EPROM memory microchip showing the memory blocks and supporting circuitry In 1958, a Texas Instruments engineer named Jack Kilby cast a pattern onto the surface of an 11-millimeter-long "chip" of semiconducting germanium, creating the first ever integrated circuit. Because the circuit contained a single transistor a sort of miniature switch the chip could hold one "bit" of data: either a 1 or a 0, depending on the transistor's configuration. Since then, and with unflagging consistency, engineers have managed to double the number of transistors they can fit on computer chips every two years. They do it by regularly halving the size of transistors. Today, after dozens of iterations of this doubling and halving rule, transistors measure just a few atoms across, and a typical computer chip holds 9 million of them per square millimeter. Computers with more transistors can perform more computations per second (because there are more transistors available for firing), and are therefore more powerful. The doubling of computing power every two years is known as "Moore's law," after Gordon Moore, the Intel engineer who first noticed the trend in 1965. Moore's law renders last year's laptop models defunct, and it will undoubtedly make next year's tech devices breathtakingly small and fast compared to today's. But consumerism aside, where is the exponential growth in computing power ultimately headed? Will computers eventually outsmart humans? And will they ever stop becoming more powerful? The singularity Many scientists believe the exponential growth in computing power leads inevitably to a future moment when computers will attain human-level intelligence: an event known as the "singularity." And according to some, the time is nigh. Physicist, author and self-described "futurist" Ray Kurzweil has predicted that computers will come to par with humans within two decades. He told Time Magazine last year that engineers will successfully reverse-engineer the human brain by the mid-2020s, and by the end of that decade, computers will be capable of human-level intelligence. The conclusion follows from projecting Moore's law into the future. If the doubling of computing power every two years continues to hold, "then by 2030 whatever technology we're using will be sufficiently small that we can fit all the computing power that's in a human brain into a physical volume the size of a brain," explained Peter Denning, distinguished professor of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School and an expert on innovation in computing. "Futurists believe that's what you need for artificial intelligence. At that point, the computer starts thinking for itself." [How to Build a Human Brain] What happens next is uncertain and has been the subject of speculation since the dawn of computing. "Once the machine thinking method has started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers," Alan Turing said in 1951 at a talk entitled "Intelligent Machinery: A heretical theory," presented at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. "At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control." The British mathematician I.J. Good hypothesized that "ultraintelligent" machines, once created, could design even better machines. "There would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make," he wrote. Buzz about the coming singularity has escalated to such a pitch that there's even a book coming out next month, called "Singularity Rising" (BenBella Books), by James Miller, an associate professor of economics at Smith College, about how to survive in a post- singularity world. [Could the Internet Ever Be Destroyed?] Brain-like processing But not everyone puts stock in this notion of a singularity, or thinks we'll ever reach it. "A lot of brain scientists now believe the complexity of the brain is so vast that even if we could build a computer that mimics the structure, we still don't know if the thing we build would be able to function as a brain," Denning told Life's Little Mysteries. Perhaps without sensory inputs from the outside world, computers could never become self-aware. Others argue that Moore's law will soon start to break down, or that it has already. The argument stems from the fact that engineers can't miniaturize transistors much more than they already have, because they're already pushing atomic limits. "When there are only a few atoms in a transistor, you can no longer guarantee that a few atoms behave as they're supposed to," Denning explained. On the atomic scale, bizarre quantum effects set in. Transistors no longer maintain a single state represented by a "1" or a "0," but instead vacillate unpredictably between the two states, rendering circuits and data storage unreliable. The other limiting factor, Denning says, is that transistors give off heat when they switch between states, and when too many transistors, regardless of their size, are crammed together onto a single silicon chip, the heat they collectively emit melts the chip. For these reasons, some scientists say computing power is approaching its zenith. "Already we see a slowing down of Moore's law," the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku said in a BigThink lecture in May. But if that's the case, it's news to many. Doyne Farmer, a professor of mathematics at Oxford University who studies the evolution of technology, says there is little evidence for an end to Moore's law. "I am willing to bet that there is insufficient data to draw a conclusion that a slowing down [of Moore's law] has been observed," Farmer told Life's Little Mysteries. He says computers continue to grow more powerful as they become more brain-like. Computers can already perform individual operations orders of magnitude faster than humans can, Farmer said; meanwhile, the human brain remains far superior at parallel processing, or performing multiple operations at once. For most of the past half-century, engineers made computers faster by increasing the number of transistors in their processors, but they only recently began "parallelizing" computer processors. To work around the fact that individual processors can't be packed with extra transistors, engineers have begun upping computing power by building multi-core processors, or systems of chips that perform calculations in parallel."This controls the heat problem, because you can slow down the clock," Denning explained. "Imagine that every time the processor's clock ticks, the transistors fire. So instead of trying to speed up the clock to run all these transistors at faster rates, you can keep the clock slow and have parallel activity on all the chips." He says Moore's law will probably continue because the number of cores in computer processors will go on doubling every two years. And because parallelization is the key to complexity, "In a sense multi-core processors make computers work more like the brain," Farmer told Life's Little Mysteries. And then there's the future possibility of quantum computing, a relatively new field that attempts to harness the uncertainty inherent in quantum states in order to perform vastly more complex calculations than are feasible with today's computers. Whereas conventional computers store information in bits, quantum computers store information in qubits: particles, such as atoms or photons, whose states are "entangled" with one another, so that a change to one of the particles affects the states of all the others. Through entanglement, a single operation performed on a quantum computer theoretically allows the instantaneous performance of an inconceivably huge number of calculations, and each additional particle added to the system of entangled particles doubles the performance capabilities of the computer. If physicists manage to harness the potential of quantum computers something they are struggling to do Moore's law will certainly hold far into the future, they say. Ultimate limit If Moore's law does hold, and computer power continues to rise exponentially (either through human ingenuity or under its own ultraintelligent steam), is there a point when the progress will be forced to stop? Physicists Lawrence Krauss and Glenn Starkman say "yes." In 2005, they calculated that Moore's law can only hold so long before computers actually run out of matter and energy in the universe to use as bits. Ultimately, computers will not be able to expand further; they will not be able to co-opt enough material to double their number of bits every two years, because the universe will be accelerating apart too fast for them to catch up and encompass more of it. So, if Moore's law continues to hold as accurately as it has so far, when do Krauss and Starkman say computers must stop growing? Projections indicate that computer will encompass the entire reachable universe, turning every bit of matter and energy into a part of its circuit, in 600 years' time. That might seem very soon. "Nevertheless, Moore's law is an exponential law," Starkman, a physicist at Case Western University, told Life's Little Mysteries. You can only double the number of bits so many times before you require the entire universe. Personally, Starkman thinks Moore's law will break down long before the ultimate computer eats the universe. In fact, he thinks computers will stop getting more powerful in about 30 years. Ultimately, there's no telling what will happen. We might reach the singularity the point when computers become conscious, take over, and then start to self-improve. Or maybe we won't. This month, Denning has a new paper out in the journal Communications of the ACM, called "Don't feel bad if you can't predict the future." It's about all the people who have tried to do so in the past, and failed. Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover or Life's Little Mysteries @llmysteries. 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Vision as well as sound, oh my! When British telecommunication giant BT imagined the future of communication technology from videoconferencing to high-definition document transmission they made their most conceptually innovative proposition, the notion of telecommuting, with a kind of facetiousness most ironic in the context of todays remote-everything workplace. In 1980, a TV segment entitled Telefuture envisions a world of television-based information services. While at its core lies a fascinating and, in retrospect, remarkably accurate exploration of the exponential progression of technology including transmedia experiences that even modernity cant get quite right, like Internet TV the excitement and language used to describe technologies we now find primitive is a disarming source of amusement. We held it together quite admirably, until the vintage-voiced man described basic 8-bit diversions as incredibly complex games at that point, through tears of laughter, we wonder how his vocabulary of superlatives would hold up against the latest Halo 3 or Guitar Hero.