Photo by NASA's Apollo 8 crew
When I was a kid I always used to day dream about what the future would be like. It was the usual stuff, space travel, flying cars etc. I had no idea that computers would change the world as much as they have. But I am certain that we haven't seen anything yet. The best IS yet to come.
But before I get started on the future let me say this. Life is about change. I have been around for nearly 60 years now and worked my entire life in the Technology sector. In order to understand what change is, lets go back to when I was a kid and see how much has changed since then.
I was born in 1950. When I was a kid we didn't have television. The first coast to coast TV broadcast didn't happen until 1953. That was the same year that Saran Wrap was invented. There was no plastic food wrap before that. Plastic sandwich bags weren't invented until 1958, and the zipper on plastic bags didn't come until well after that.
If we look back a few years earlier it is even more dramatic. My Grandma Nellie was born in 1898. She raised 12 kids on a farm in Kansas. There were no disposable diapers back then. She had to launder the diapers for 12 kids by hand. There was no electricity or washing machines, she had to scrub all the laundry by hand and hang it out on the line to dry. The water for the washing had to be carried from the well and heated in pots on the wood fired stove. If she wanted laundry soap, she had to boil up tubs of home made lye soap over an open fire in the yard. She always ironed all that laundry - without an electic iron. Her iron had to be heated on that same wood stove. Oh yeah, because of the long work hours on the farm, she had to cook 4 meals a day for her family as well. I have no idea how she managed to do it all.
In the area of transportation, the Interstate Highway system (the freeway) wasn't started until the 1950s when President Eisenhower pushed through the National Highway Act. In Air Transportation Jets hadn't hit the market yet. The first jet propelled version of Air Force One was purchased in 1958. Before that everything was propeller driven.
There was no such thing as personal electronics. Probably the first thing to qualify for that was the transistor radio, which was invented in 1956. There were no pocket calculators or digital wrist watches. There were no computer video games or even home computers until the 1980s. the cassette recorder wasn't invented until 1963. In fact, the first McDonalds chain restaurant didn't open until 1955.
When I started working on computers in the 1970s there was no such thing as non-volatile RAM. If a computer lost power it forgot everything - even how to boot itself. Computers in those days had banks of binary switches on the front. You would have to set up the binary code that corresponded to the first op code and load that into Address 1, then you would use those binary switches to set up the second op code and load that into address 2 and so on. When you finished loading the little loader program this way, you would use the binary switches to load address 1 into the Program Counter, then hit the run switch.
If you had done everything right then the computer would go out and read sector zero of the disk drive and execute its bootstrap program. That's how you booted your computer. Disk drives in those days held 96 megabytes (not Gigabytes) of data and were the size of a washing machine! I used to have to change the read/write heads in my disk drives.
Now can you imagine what life must have been like before the invention of all these modern conveniences? That's exactly how people will feel 50 years from now when they look back at 2009! Only I expect the rate of change over the next 50 years to dwarf what we have seen in the last 50 years.
This is where you need to fasten your seat belt. The last 50 years have been child's play. You see, the rate of change in the technological world is not a linear function. It is an exponential function. What do I mean by that? Well, let's look at a graph of an exponential function. Let's look at world population. If you look at the graph on the left, you can see that something dramatic has happened to world population in recent years. It has been experiencing what is called exponential growth. In other words it's not just that the population is increasing, but increasing at a steady rate.
Now we can actually calculate the mathematical formula that fits graph and it tells us something very interesting. You see, exponential functions are unbounded. That is to say they can increase all the way to infinity. So am I trying to tell you here that human population will eventually reach infinity? Well, not exactly. We both know that couldn't happen. Before we ever got there people would blanket the planet like a plague of locusts. We would devour all it's resources and run out of food, water, living space, even air.
So the human population could never reach infinity. Why before we got there we'd see massive famines and wars over land and resources and so on. So all of that would happen before we reached an infinite population and would have the effect of dramatically reducing that population.
What's the matter, you don't find that particularly reassuring? Well, you don't have to worry about it yet. If you look at the mathematical formula that best fits this pattern of world population growth, we won't be depleting the worlds resources until the year 2035 or so. So we have at least several more years of business as usual before the corrective forces start kicking in.
But really, don't let me freak you out here. The experts tell us that the rate of increase has started to slow down in recent years, although there is still a positive rate of increase. So I'm sure they know what they are talking about, right?
But moving right along, there are other types of exponential functions going on out there today. Lets look at the one to the right here. This is the number of transistors in a microprocessor chip. You can see that it also describes an exponential curve. I have taken the liberty of plotting a best fit curve on top of the data so you can see the trend more clearly.
This is only one graph. There are lots more of them that display the exponential nature of modern technological development. In fact there is a good sampling of them at this website: The Singularity is Near. You might want to look at some of them.
All of this impies that eventually computers are going to be smarter than people. You can do the math on it. The human brain is of fixed size. If we used 100% of our brain capacity we can actually calculate our computing capacity. Our brains contain about 100 Billion neurons, each of which has about 1000 synaptic connections which fire at the rate of 200 times per second. That works out to about 216 calculations per second. That's a lot of brain power there!
At current trends, high performance computers should reach that capacity in about 5 or 6 more years. But 2025 the average home computer will have that kind of computing power.
By 2045 there should be high performance computers with the computing capacity of all the human brains on the planet combined.
The end result of all this is an event called the Singularity. You see, the rate of technological advancement is directly related to how many smart brains you have working on the problems. So, at some point in the not so distant future that equation is going to be dramatically skewed by the amount of super-intelligent brainpower available to throw at computational problems. The Singularity is what happens when super-intelligent computers begin designing the next generation of super-intelligent computers. The end result would be a dramatic leap in the abilities of thinking machines. So if computer technology continues in it's current exponential trend, in the next few years we are going to be seeing some mind boggling, even inconceivable advances.
That's why Google and NASA joined forces in February of 2009 to fund the Singularity Institute. The institute has pulled together some of the best minds in the fields of Artificial Intelligence to address the problem of creating a powerful artificial intelligence that also has a sense of morality.
Wow, that's some vision for the future isn't it? Well it's only the tip of the iceberg. There are similar dramatic increases in the rate of technological change happening in the fields of biotechnology and nanotechnology that will lead to equally world changing outcomes. The amazing thing is that all these exponential trends seem to go nearly vertical, somewhere around 2045. That's when everything comes together in the Singularity.
How much of this do I believe? Well, I'm not really sure. But one thing is absolutely clear. I have seen a lot of change in the last 60 years. In fact I've seen enough to make my head spin. But what is coming in the next 40 years or so is going to dwarf everything I've seen in my lifetime.
And I can't help it. I'm a total geek here. I'm rooting for the computers! Just kidding, but I do want to stick around and see as much of this as I can. I believe that the age of conscious computers is right around the corner, and having worked on them all of my life, I'm looking forward to sitting down and getting to know one. Perhaps I can teach it a thing or two, and vice versa I'm sure.
