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technology of future computers
decoy_octopus
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So my dad was telling me how he just talked to his friend who works in a think-tank at Los Alamos. His job is to come up with the concept ideas for inventions post-future. Kinda like the stuff that will be invented after we are all dead. He told my dad that roughly 100 years from now, computers will be as different as contemporary-computers are now compared to the old pull-crank adding machines. And they won't run on electricity. Due to confidentiality agreements, the friend could not tell my dad more.
I'm curious what kinda theories have been released--as to alternatives to electricity. What could we possibly use unstead of electricity? Any thoughts?
I'm curious what kinda theories have been released--as to alternatives to electricity. What could we possibly use unstead of electricity? Any thoughts?
decoy_octopus on
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Chiffon has the most RAM.
And yes, they've been talking about organic-based chips ever since "omigod, the human genome, we are gods unto men!"
And in the last ten years I think that's about as far as they've gotten with that. A kind of "wow, wouldn't it be neat?"
I'd say that our own projections about 2100 are actually going to prove to be less accurate.
That's not too far off. Replace those old planes with jumbo jets and the sky bridges with subways and you're good to go.
Though we've never been that great at predicting the future. If we were, we wouldn't be writing messages to each other on the internet on computers right now.
So if you were to replace the single most defining element of the picture with something completely different that is currently used (meaning the prophecy is strictly 'tall buildings would exist') it would be a fairly accurate description of modern cities? Incredible!
Notice the elevated tracks running alongside buildings above boulevards dedicated solely to motorized traffic rather than any pedestrians at all. That is the exact opposite of where New York is heading, pushing the use of pedestrian traffic over driving. Let alone promoting trains running through/over skyscrapers at 60 storys.
The subway is a major part of many modern cities. They got the aethetics a bit wrong, but the function is still there. As far as pedestrian traffic is concerned, they had no way of predicting that.
We may not be able to predict what the internals of a computer in the distant future will be made of, but the fact remains we do know what computers will be doing 100 years, even 1000 years down the line. To me that's the more interesting prospect of all this. And I suspect for many others as well.
Subways do not line both sides of every street as well as bridge the tops of buildings to have roughly 5 lines intersect every block. Even bus lines aren't as frequent as this and they don't require any infrastructure or encroach on the building owner at all.
That was my point. This is laughably inaccurate. In a hundred years time our own predictions will be even moreso. Who else is waiting for jetpacks and flying cars?
...
By this logic, the printing press is no different than a quill pen.
Not quite. A typewriter would be the more accurate machine to fit this comparison.
I went to a science and technology seminar way back when I was in secondary school, and the main speaker talked about DNA computers - he claimed that the supercomputers of five years ago could fit into a DNA processor the size of a raindrop. Eh, could happen, but my money's still on diamond chips.
Our social and technological evolution over the last 100 years has been an explosion.
The next hundred years of social evolution, through a means of global interpersonal connection like the internet, the world will be a completely different place.
Also:
No, there would probably be a different material being used that'll be gauged in a different manner. You don't have any number of vacuum tubes in your computer right now. Same might become true of silicon before too long.
If these technologies aren't going to come about until we're all long-dead, I wonder why there was a non-disclosure agreement. Is this think tank trying to pre-emptively patent these ideas for profit or something?
That only goes back 100 years.
And modern computer technology would look like magic to anyone from early 1900s.
edit: or chuck babbage
or chuck dodgson
in short, the smart people would not be hugely surprised.
I'm curious what group or contractor your dad's friend works for. I grew up in Los Alamos and worked at the Lab for around four years.
Why do you assume people of the past are always some kind of dumbasses? They invented the shit we have today.
They're not dumbasses, but they did live under restrictions as to what can be accomplished because they lacked certain inventions.
The same could be said of us. And just about anybody that has ever lived.
That's exactly the point. We don't know what the future will be like indefinitely!
On a long enough time line, nobody knows shit. Not even you Thanatos.
Well, yes, that's true. If I'm interpreting correctly, he just meant to say that the technological advances that will be made over 100 years of modern history are essentially impossible to imagine with any sort of accuracy, and maybe seem to be fantastic or impossible. As opposed to, say, meaning that they would cower in fear and try to voodoo it away.
Or, as Arthur C. Clark said it: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The problem with that quote is it has no reference point.
Supposedly optical computers might be in the works, where they do calculations using light based "circuitry" instead of electricty. Still uses electricity, but the calculations aren't done as such. Quantum computers have different possibilities for the precise physical medium used, but there is still a lot of work needed to be done to make them remotely useful.
Other than that I don't know.
There's a link to the quote, if that's what you meant by reference point.
If you meant some period of time Clark was talking about to compare to our conversation (or an alien encounter) I kinda feel like it's beside the point. As far as I can tell, nobody was specifically insulting people from the early 1900s, or any era of the past. I'd guess that the use of the word "magic" was largely due to the Clark quote, as it's fairly well known.
Sure, it's possible that people would assume a fantastically advanced technology, 100 years or more ahead of its time, to be nothing more than what it is. But there are most definitely lots of people from any time period who would assume it to be supernatural, and other who would assume it's fake.
Are you talking about the ones using lasers directed at a specific kind of plastic to discern data with the optical computer, or a wholly different kind of computer that I haven't heard about?
Hopefully it's one based on hue and intensity as I've been predicting for a decade now.
But all colors fade with time and exposure which would corrupt your info. Of course, it'd be nice to finally understand what Pollock was going on about.
I was mostly envisioning it as a matter of data transfer. For storage, you'd have to find something that can be put in a variety of relatively stable states that can coexist next to each other.
Overall, I think we need to move past binary.
I don't remember hearing anything about the specific mechanics of it, so I don't know. Something analogous to the difference between fiber optical cable and copper cable for transmissions is what I would guess. I've heard about some recent developments into optics but I wasn't enough of an engineering or physics buff to dig up the specifics.
After having done a bit of reading about them, I'm not convinced that they're suitable for any kind of use, or ever will be.
Need more processing? Just add on five more processing plates. More storage? Add a few more exobytes by slipping on a storage plate, etc. I think we'll see this idea come into place more and more where the frame work of the device is actually the computing system itself. So the sunroof in your smartcar is really the solid circuitry of your solar powered GPS navsat system. The weave in your shirt is the storage medium for your iPod. Contact lenses? Modern blackberry. White living room paint? Nano optic fibre compound for an HD surroundTheatre display.
We probably wont even notice that the price tags on our fruit allows them to be counted, and taken off as debit to our personal account when we leave the store. Or that the company tie pin prelights long hallways and acts as your keyring. Certain aspects to technology will become nearly invisible, and others will be far more glaring, just like it always has been. I'm just hoping that the brain vat is invented before I die. I would so volunteer for that.
But seriously?
Processing (that's what computing is, screw transistors and boolean logic) will take place outside our currently accessible reality.
By studying how elementary particles 'know' what they are, we might be able to form our own particles.
Using the same technology we might shape them into currently know 'states'.
This opens the possibility of using particles, rather than our equipment, to form other particles.
Which would compare to a transistor with 12 gates.
The next step is to figure out how to play 'game of life' without converting the whole universe to one big computer.
But if we get there we'll have processing power far beyond the puny trinary qubits of today.
Not that a supermagiconotron that breaks the first law and, like, spontaneously creates energy from nothing or something wouldn't be kind of neat, of course.
EDIT: With the trinary qubit thing, he probably got confused when reading one of those things that say "bits are on or off, but qubits are on, off or a superposition of both"
The superposition isn't a third state though, just a... superposition of the other two