Think about a heavily researched idea we're contemplating right now called flat space. The idea being we can compress entire objects down to the 2nd dimension and then transport them. At first you might think about some future where you put your car in your wallet or something however first we'd need to find a proper method for manipulating the higgs field first otherwise that car will still weigh the same regardless of size. Just because it's flat doesn't mean it suddenly weighs less we're merely removing the empty space in the object along one dimension. The more practical use for this though is space travel. By compressing vast amounts of free space in front of us into flat space. Then decompressing them after we've moved past the compressed area. The end result is traveling extreme distances almost instantly without actually traveling any faster.
One of the most awesome pieces of tech in the near future is early quantum computers. Once we find a way to slightly isolate them from themselves, so their future computations don't travel back in time or vice versa thereby altering their states and destroying the process, thereby making them functional we will have astounding leaps in computational power. The interesting power of a quantum computer is that rather than the simple two state bits of today in silicone computers quantum state computers work with 4 states. Namely they work with yes, no, maybe, and both, which is to say rather than just 0 or 1 it can be both it can be either and it can be neither. It's hard to measure how much of an immediate increase this will yield but if I had to estimate I'd say if you're still measuring in hertz "hz" while today we float around 4ghz the quantum computers we're making right now once we get them properly functional will have a processor rate hundreds of thousands of times as fast. We'd be starting in the tera hertz range if not peta hertz. Though I wouldn't call it likely it might even be slightly possible for an exa hertz beyond that. The reason why is that with these multiple states each are that would normally represent a single bit can exist in multiple states at once making it supremely effective at multitasking. While the processor in this case would be working on one problem it would also be working on several others at the same time without having to finish one first before moving on unlike right now where the processor moves from task to task, I'll be it very rapidly but all the same only one smaller task at a time. While it may break up larger tasks into smaller ones and multiple cores handle different parts at the same time the underlying mechanism of bits can only exist in one state at a time switching from on to off or from 1 to 0 and back and can never be both and can only be one or the other. With a quantum state processor you're looking at a minimum magnitude gain of 4^4 or 256x current processing power and that's a very low ball number. Realistically I see gains more likely in the range of 512x to 1024x current processing power. The sad truth of the matter is though that once we do manage to harness this tech we'll have almost no idea what to do with it. We're looking at rebuilding everything we know about computers from the ground up. For starters it's likely no currently existing program will be able to run on this new tech, there won't be much of an operating system until one is built with these multiple states in mind and none of the programming languages will work either you'll have to rebuild them all as well.
Hopefully the new foundation used to build these quantum computers will translate well in the further distant future when we enter the wild frontier of organic computing. Theoretical estimates of this idea suggest the computational power of organic computers will be in the magnitude of 8^27 current processing power. If you can't quite understand the number I'll break it down into simple 3rd grade math for you. 8 to the 27th power is 8*8 or 8x8 27 times, 8 times 8 times 8 times 8 etc. This is a very large number but I'll break it down in steps.
8*8=64
64*8=512
512*8=4096
4096*8=32768
32768*8=262144
(beyond this point I'll insert commas every 3rd number to denominate hundres, thousands, millions, etc)
262144*8=2,097,152
2097152*8=16,777,216
(now we assume the previous number times 8 is the next number in the list)
134,217,728
1,073,741,824
8,589,934,592
68,719,476,736
549,755,813,888
4,398,046,511,104
35,184,372,088,832
281,474,976,710,656
2,251,799,813,685,248
18,014,398,509,481,984
144,115,188,075,855,872
1,152,921,504,606,846,976
9,223,372,036,854,775,808
73,786,976,294,838,206,464
590,295,810,358,705,651,712
4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696
37,778,931,862,957,161,709,568
302,231,454,903,657,293,676,544
2,417,851,639,229,258,349,412,352
Yes you read that right the final number in full form for 8^27 is 2417851639229258349412352x current processing power.
Simply put it will be impossible for any human to ever fully utilize this awesome power with traditional interface methods or programming ideals. The future will be built on direct thought interpretations likely non invasive reading and understanding of what the user wants. You will speak with your computer as though it were a person and it will understand you. The likely truth though is you won't need to as it will probably know what you're going to say before you do. It will be able to construct with complete precision anything you can request in a digital form, your thoughts will come to life around you in this future world. Meanwhile it will be contemplating things far beyond your comprehension and devising solutions to any problem you can imagine. The massive amount of code necessary will likely be a wild amalgamation of what it creates for itself from the foundation work we lay in the process of quantum computing. In the end with all this raw power the sad truth will still be we'll have intergalactic teleportation before we have flying cars.
rather have intergalactic teleportation than flying cars anyway, can you think what idiots would do when they can go anywhere, pfft bad enough now. I like the first idea, that would be very useful. The computer can be kind of scary though. What I'm waiting for is teleportation type pads, where you can instantly send stuff, like a fax, except actual materials.
ReplyDeleteMy dreams of getting cyborg implants are getting closer then I guess. Or at the very least, downloading my brain into a computer and then installing myself into a mech.
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