Future Computers

What Will Computers Look Like in 30 Years?

64 is the New 16

The picture above is the front panel from my very first computer, a 1982, Data General Nova
1200. It was the cat's pajamas because it allowed me to enter two characters (16 bits) at a
time, instead of eight bits (a byte). I was pleased as punchcards to enter my ten-letter name in
under a minute in binary code. Today, I talk into my 64 bit smart phone, and as quick as my
kids, it talks back.

My point, (before I forget it), is that I went from toggle switches to voice recognition in just 30
years. From DOS to Windows. From the first Mac to the latest iPhone. From Pong to Angry
Birds. What advancements will I, (yes, I mean me), see in the next 30 years? What changes in
computers will you see in your lifetime? It's truly mind boggling.

Moore's Law

Before posting an article about the future of computers, any blogger worth their weight in
silicon will research Moore's Law, the law named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore.

Moore's Law, (more of an observation turned prediction that has more or less held up), is
described in this Intel infographic:
Since transistors are the work horses of a computer, doubling the transistors generally means
doubling the computer processing power. And it's not just CPUs that are improving at an
exponential rate. Every couple of years, storage devices like memory and hard drives are
bigger and faster, displays are better, and cameras capture better images.

Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and
economic growth - wikipedia
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

More$ Law

From Boyle to Newton, the best laws are self-explanatory, come with a catchy phrase and a
cool drawing. There is probably some research that goes along with it, but I imagine that can
be exhausting. Based on my personal (computer) experiences, I propose a new technology
predicting law.
Computers of Tomorrow

Today's computers operate using semiconductors, metals and electricity. Future computers
might use atoms, dna or light. Moore's Law predicts doubling, but when computers go from
quartz to quantum, the factor will be off the scale.

What would the world be like, if computers the size of molecules become a reality? These are
the types of computers that could be everywhere, but never seen. Nano sized bio-computers
that could target specific areas inside your body. Giant networks of computers, in your
clothing, your house, your car. Entrenched in almost every aspect of our lives and yet you may
never give them a single thought.

What will computers look like in 30 years? Trick question. You won't see them at all.

Ubiquitous computers are in the works.

Grasping the Technologies

Understanding the theories behind these future computer technologies is not for the meek.
My research into quantum computers was made all the more difficult after I learned that in
light of her constant interference, it is theoretically possible my mother-in-law could be in two
places at once.

If you have the heart, take a gander at the most promising new computer technologies. If not,
dare to imagine the ways that billions of tiny, powerful computers will change our society.
Quantum Computers

The Bloch sphere is a representation of a qubit, the fundamental building block of quantum
computers.

What are Quantum Computers?

A quantum computer is a computer that makes direct use of distinctively quantum mechanical
phenomena to perform operations on data.

In a classical (or conventional) computer, the amount of data is measured by bits; in a

Source: Wikipedia

The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties of particles can be
used to represent and structure data, and that quantum mechanisms can be devised and built
to perform operations with these data.

Microsoft video Quantum Computing 101 (July 2014)

Optical Computers

What are Optical Computers?

The computers we use today use transistors and semiconductors to control electricity.
Computers of the future may utilize crystals and metamaterials to control light. Optical
computers make use of light particles called photons.

Image source: Wikimedia

NASA scientists are working to solve the need for computer speed using light
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. That's 982,080,000 feet per second -- or
11,784,960,000 inches. In a billionth of a second, one nanosecond, photons of light travel just
a bit less than a foot, not considering resistance in air or of an optical fiber strand or thin film.
Just right for doing things very quickly in microminiaturized computer chips.

Dr. Donald Frazier monitors a blue laser light used with electro-optical materials

"Entirely optical computers are still some time in the future," says Dr. Frazier, "but electro-
optical hybrids have been possible since 1978, when it was learned that photons can respond
to electrons through media such as lithium niobate. Newer advances have produced a variety
of thin films and optical fibers that make optical interconnections and devices practical. We are
focusing on thin films made of organic molecules, which are more light sensitive than
inorganics.

Organics can perform functions such as switching, signal processing and frequency doubling
using less power than inorganics. Inorganics such as silicon used with organic materials let us
use both photons and electrons in current hybrid systems, which will eventually lead to all-
optical computer systems."

"What we are accomplishing in the lab today will result in development of super-fast, super-
miniaturized, super-lightweight and lower cost optical computing and optical communication
devices and systems," Frazier explained.

Article and image from: Science@NASA

Biological Computers

Bio computers, genetic computers, or DNA computers might use living

Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech

http://www.futureforall.org/computers/computers.htm

http://www.futureforall.org/computers/quantumcomputers.htm

http://www.futureforall.org/computers/opticalcomputers.htm

http://www.futureforall.org/computers/dnacomputers.htm
What will personal computers look like in 20 years' time?

Our devices will have an emotion chip, much like a GPS location chip. It will use optical sensors,
and perhaps other sensors, to read your emotions - your facial expressions, tone of voice, your
physiology. This chip will also drive actions in response to your emotions. My mirror could
sense I am stressed, and communicate this to my social robot, car and wearable phone-watch-
health device, so that these adjust the way they interact with me. In this mood-aware internet
of things, the emotion chip - always activated with our permission - will make our technology
interactions more genuine and human."

"With the speed of wireless internet increasing, the location of the actual data processing will
not be on your personal device, but on a distant, more powerful machine connected via
the cloud. Such computers may belong to the general extremely powerful quantum class that
will be developed in ten to 20 years. These technologies will, in just a few milliseconds, crack
problems which would take the fastest conventional computer millions of years. Everything
from breaking codes to searching data sets to the creation of new materials."

"Personal computing will become intra-personal and intra-cellular. Each human neuron will be
hijacked by a self-growing, self-repairing, molecular network. Computers will be networks of
polymer filaments growing inside and together with a human. 'Seeds' of the networks will be
injected into embryos in the first month of their development. They will form a gigantic
network inside the brain. Computers will be inside us. They will span all living creatures in a
united computing network."

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.