TECH SPECIAL............. Soon, phones smarter than us

Soon, phones smarter than us





Computing power is rising exponentially.

Should we be excited or scared?

The US maintained strict export controls during the 1970s and '80s to prevent countries such as India and Russia from gaining access to the Cray supercomputers which gave it a huge military advantage. These cost tens of millions of dollars, weighed hundreds of kilos, and had to be housed in large buildings with special cooling systems.The smartphones that villagers in India are using today are many times more powerful -and they fit into a pocket.

That is how computing is progressing.The processing capability of a computer doubles every 18 months. At this rate, a $1000 laptop will have the computing power and storage capacity of a human brain by 2023.

The implications are mind-boggling.Within seven years -when the iPhone 11 is likely to be released -our smartphones will be as computationally intelligent as we are. It doesn't stop there. These devices will continue to advance, exponentially , until they exceed the combined intelligence of the human race. Already, our computers have a big advantage over us: they are connected via the internet and share information with each other billions of times faster than we can. It is hard to even imagine what be comes possible with these advances and what the implications are.

Some people doubt that computing will con tinue to advance at this pace. This progression is known as Moore's Law and has to do with the shrinking of computer circuits. Nothing can be smaller than an atom, and that is how small transistors will need to be by 2025 to keep pace. Intel acknowledges these limits but suggests that Moore's Law can keep going for another five to 10 years. So the silicon-based computer chips in our laptops will likely sputter their way to match the power of a human brain.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil says Moore's law isn't the be-all of computing and the advances will continue regardless of what Intel can do with silicon. Moore's Law was just one of five paradigms in computing: electromechanical, relay , vacuum tube, discrete transistor and integrated circuits.Kurzweil says technology has been advancing exponentially since the advent of evolution on Earth and so is computing power: from the mechanical calculating devices used in the 1890 US Census, via the machines that cracked the Nazi enigma code, the CBS vacuum-tube computer, the transistor-based machines used in the first space launches, and more recently the integrated circuit-based PC.

With exponentially advancing technologies, things move very slowly at first and then advance dramatically . Each new technology advances along an S-curve -an exponential beginning, flattening out as the technology reaches its limits. As one technology ends, the next paradigm takes over. That is what has been happening, and why there will be new computing paradigms after Moore's Law.

Already , there are significant advances on the horizon, such as the GPU, which uses parallel computing to create massive increases in performance, not only for graphics but also for neural networks, which constitute the architecture of the human brain. There are 3D chips in development that can pack circuits in layers.IBM and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are developing cognitivecomputing chips. New materials, such as gallium arsenide, carbon nanotubes, and graphene, are showing huge promise as replacements for silicon. And then there is the most interesting -and scary -technology of all: quantum computing.

Instead of encoding information as a zero or one, as today's computers do, quantum computers will use quantum bits, or qubits, whose states encode an entire range of possibilities by capitalizing on the quantum phenomena of superposition and entanglement. Computations that would take today's computers thousands of years will occur in minutes on these.

The consequences of these advances are both scary and exciting. Tech luminaries such as Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates worry about a “super intelligence“. Musk fears “we are summoning the demon“. Hawking says it “could spell the end of the human race“. Gates wrote: “I don't understand why some people are not concerned“. But Kurzweil believes we will create a benevolent intelligence that will help us address the problems of disease, hunger, energy , education, and clean water. We need to do all we can to harness these technologies for bettering the world.

Vivek Wadhwa

The writer is director of research at Duke University

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