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On the last Message boards there was some discussion that turned into what the limits of computer would be. There was talk of More?s law soon breaking down for silicon ships. (I forget if the discussion originally started about AI or some kind of massive neural network). Anyway, it occurred to me that whether or not chip size speed will continue to increase at an exponential rate, we still have come no where close to the limits of computing. Currently chips are seven times faster then the bus on the computer can respond. In the near future computers will undergo a major architecture change. Chips will have new instruction sets making threading a low level task. Each chip will be able to pas function calls and parameters to neighbouring chips. Memory will be networked in such away to allow several memory locations to be accessed simultaneously. The amount microprocessors in a computer will grow by orders of magnitude and the heat given off per processor will fall substantially. Computers are still far in there infancy.
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How fast you can make a silicon chip per amount of chip is a dictated by quantum mechanics, at a certian point your electons start tunneling through the walls of the chip, which is not very good, you know. I don't know if anyone really knows even a rough sketch of what we will be able to do by arranging chips in different architectures however or designing new interfaces between them.... that is something I have not looked at much, despite the awesome potential (neurons are not very fast-- yet by working together, a human brain is faster than the fastest supercomputer yet made).
Optical, chemical, and even quantum computing are also sweeping possibilities should they turn out to be practical.
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After such a long time since the last post, you'd think we'd have a lot to say regarding the "future of computers" five years in the future, that is to say, now. Well ...
We have flat screens, a great boon to our eyesight. I'm pretty sure my dominate eye's macular degeneration began when I took up my old Macintosh white screen CRT every day for months to write a book. Since replacing the CRT display in my present PC, my sight has almost returned to normal 20/20, something that's not supposed to be possible. I wonder if anyone out there has experienced the same. I'd like to compare.
DVD's played by the computer preserve movie picture (film) quality by eliminating scanning raster lines. This suggests that television receiver circuitry could utilize latest computer display techniques to make raster lines invisible when projected on the wall.
Physical size reduction and wireless-ness have advanced beyond the best that Star Trek predicted. The voice responses on my (computer generated) telephone voice mail messages are no longer disturbingly artificial sounding. If cost were no object, I believe they could be indistinguishable from live. Derived, admittedly, from real voices, rather than "Voder" synthesis because of ram advances.
The present advances in memory capacity and speed have happened much faster than I could've imagined back in 2001.
Automation in eg. automobile manufacturing by robot welders, manipulators and sprayers under computer control is about what was expected, since the design of the robots themselves are in a steep learning curve, like automobiles from 1900-40. Computers in cars since the 1990's have become as essential to the new engines. It's the cars themselves which have been a disappointment. By now, we should all be driving gas/electric hybrids of one sort or another, in cities, where it should be unlawful to idle an internal combustion engine in traffic, at the very least.
What hasn't happened, because we don't seem to be able to, is produce a "thinking" computer, much less a "self conscious" computer capable of meta-cognitive reasoning. Not that I'm so sure that consciousness is something computers should be allowed to possess, even if it was possible. Computer science as pursued today may not even be capable of self awareness, since it varies so much from the animal brain organization. I predict that efforts will be made to establish, theoretically, if computer network circuitry can do more than only imitate consciousness, conteracting the position of Turing. If so, then present trends can be allowed to proceed along present lines: faster, smaller, internet interconnectable without limit worldwide, multispectral vision seamless robotic manipulator control, etc.--without the possibility of "take-over" self-awarness, which conceivably could progress beyond our ability to prevent such a scary thing from happening.
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