In the 1960s, a computer was a big machine that commanded its own air-conditioned room, along with peripherals like tape drives as tall as an adult human, and, of course, numerous technicians to operate all the equipment. Today, your smartphone has far more computing power, and far more memory, than a 1960s computer.
Today, IBM has a computer called Watson that is capable of learning and answering questions posed in natural language. Watson employs a cluster of ninety servers, each of which uses a 3.5 GHz eight-core processor, with four threads per core. In total, the system has 2,880 processor threads and 16 terabytes of RAM. That’s a powerful machine. How long will it take engineers to package all of it into a device you can carry in your pocket? Twenty years? Maybe less.
And on that future day, the future Watson might consist of 1000 computers with each computer being equivalent to today’s Watson. How smart will that computer be? The growth of electronic technology is not linear; it is exponential. Computing power doesn’t grow in a 1-2-3-4-5-6 fashion; it grows in a 1-2-4-8-16-32 fashion.
It isn’t possible for us to conceive of where computer technology will take us in 50 years. I think it’s safe to say that tomorrow’s world will be as unrecognizable to us as a modern airport would be to a citizen of the Roman Empire. It’s very possible that computers of that future day will be self-aware. Autonomous robots, endowed with similar computing power, will also be self-aware. Computers and robots will be smarter and more capable than humans. Let’s hope they’re friendly.
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