Coming Soon: Cybermonkey 2024!
My families first computer was an IBM PC XT 5160, which featured:
- a whopping 4.77 mhz processor
- 640 kilobytes of RAM(more than anyone would ever need, according to Bill Gates at the time)
- a massive 20 megabyte hard drive
- a floppy drive(for the real floppy disks).
To put that into perspective, a top of the line computer today, from Dell would have:
- a 3.6 ghz processor
- 1 Gigabyte of RAM
- 800Gigabytes of hard drive space
- A CD-Writer and a DVD-Writer
Since it's conception, technology has always increased at a relatively constant exponential rate. According to Moore's law, transistors roughly halve in size every 2 years. What this means is that computer processor speeds double every 24 months.
If Moore's Law can be sustained for another 20 years, which many experts say that it will, we will have home PC's that would rank in the top 50 supercomputers in the world by today's standards. We're talking about processors with4 Terahertz clock speeds(although we probably won't be using clocked processors by that point). The standard amount of RAM in a computer will likely be in the Terabyte range, not to mention that the speed of your RAM will probably be in the Terahertz range as well. And, to me, this is the kicker: Petabytes of storage space on your desktop. The whole freaking internet does not contain a Petabyte of information yet. Think about that one for a minute.
What in the hell will people do with this much power? When the individual has more computational potential than many of today's World Powers, what will that mean for society? The supercomputers that have about that same amount of power today are used for some serious applications, like global weather and climate research, predicting economic trends, Nuclear bomb simulations, some truly heady stuff.
I see a future where computers will make many of our more important decisions for us. They will, after all, have approximately the same brain power as a monkey. Take a monkey, subtract the impulse to throw feces, and add in a relatively simple decision making program, and you can go play a round of golf while your monkey decides where you should be going with your life.
Computers will be our new entertainment hub. Goodbye TV. By 2024, we should all have fiber optic connections to the internet, meaning data transfers at the speed of light(or as quickly as our computers can handle the data). Downloading a movie or a new game will be practically instantaneous. Global Interactive 'TV' will be a reality. Want to make a movie? No problem. You've got a more powerful computer than the farm of computers used to make movies like "Shrek" or "The Incredibles." In fact, your computer will probably be able to play games with animation as smooth and lifelike as today's feature animated films. When Grand Theft Auto: The Amish Country comes out, it will really feel like you're dragging those damned Quakers out of their horse-drawn carriages and beating them to a bloody pulp with their own hoe.
Speech recognition will finally be a practical reality. They've been promising us this one for a while, but the nuances of language have proved to be more complex than we thought. But if a monkey can understand verbal commands, so can your cybermonkey. Just say "Cybermonkey - find me some porn," and BAM. There it is. Terabytes of glorious porn without ever touching the keyboard.
The future is coming much sooner than you thought.
posted by Rob @ 1:58 AM
1 Comments:
"So I thought that there was a physical limit to the size of tranistors that we are fast approaching, or maybe we aren't fast approching, I dunno. I thought that that they already had the ability to make transistors out of carbon tubes that operate on the atomic level."
That's true, eventually we will no longer be able to make transistors any smaller. Right now I believe we are using a 90-nanometer process for making chips, but some people believe we will be able to hone that down to a 5-nanometer process. At these dimensions, though, electrons have a habit of tunneling through the transistors, so unless we find a way to prevent that, a more practical estimate would put the limit at 16-nanometers, which we should see around 2020. But keep in mind that the first computers didn't use transistors at all, so there is nothing to say that we won't find another medium on which to compute. I believe that optical computing will be the next logical step once we have tapped the power of transistors.
"What are your thoughts on the 'neural net' theory of computation? Where in essence tiny organic computers are hooked together and comunicate independently. Much like your brain. This has the effect of increasing computing power expodentially(sic) compared to modern methods (even supercomputers). Also, there is the possibility of (I won't say intelligence) but increased 'intuitivness' by these systems because they operate by running multiple models of a simulation and which ever one suceeds quickest becomes adopted by the entire system. So in a very real sense their is a potential for spontaneous evolution of a man made system. Speaking of... did you see that guy who made a brain in a petri dish from seperated animal neurons and somehow hooked it up to a flight simulator? Apparently it's pretty good at it. Talk about 'the future is now'..."
From my understanding, neural nets are not organic, at least not in the sense that they are composed of living organisms. Neural nets are a programming model that essentially learn from their mistakes and adapt to changing conditions. They're especially good at pattern recognition, and are commonly used in handwriting recognition software and even computer games. The problem with neural nets, though, is that they are really only good at giving approximate answers from a limited set of data.
As for the petri-dish pilot, I have not heard about that. But I'm about to go google for it now.
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