High tech or lo fi future?

A friend points to aadvarks recent commentary about the future of computing and asks "So any opinions on whether we will see new technology based computers soon, or not for quite some time?"

This set off the following scree. Bit incoherent but noone reads this blog anyway so whats the harm..


Really fascinating stuff. I'm sure its a good 10 years out before we even start to see this kind of thing and at first it won't be much, but over time this stuff could become really significant - given time.

Way I look at it, there is a bit of a race here between the high-tech and lo-fi solutions to our worlds problems. Within the time frame we're talking about here (decades) I'm pretty sure that people/corporations/governments will eventually start to focus money and resources on the kind of things we need to do to avoid the myriad of "uncomfortable truth" type problems (and many others) that this world is really facing. (That is, apart from all those descent-into-fascism problems we are bringing on ourselves)

**WOAH*** wild free-ranging-pointless-speculation alert. Looks like I'm getting a bit out of control here.. you may want to stop reading

Anyway, its always seemed to me with these 'new technology' things some of them (just one of them) are just so fabulous that maybe they really could provide true solutions to some of this worlds problems: fusion reactors for energy that helps the environment; Quantum computers to, I dunno, design or control fusion reactors that actually work; or to predict the weather or to design nano-bots that can make a new generation effectively immortal (like trees) thereby changing everybodies focus to a much more long term view etc etc.

It all seems like outrageous science fiction and of course on a shorter time frame it is, but on a lnoger time frame, well I think it *could*, potentially all become real. However, if the switch in focus comes too early - before these things have been fully developed - then it will seem, at first, like its "just not enough of a priority right now" and then, as the size of the overall pie shrinks and shrinks further, the high tech solution(s) recede further and further into the realm of the outraegeously expensive and impossible to contemplate. Kind of like how we once went to the moon...

So.. a bit of a race I guess.

My money is on Quantum computing being pretty significant in the next twenty years (at least) anyway. That is some seriously cool stuff.

The most exciting thing about it, for me, is the idea as put forth by Penrose (for example) in "The Emporer's New Mind" that digital computers are *fundamentally* incapable of being 'intelligent' in the conscious, dinner-party-conversation way that we really want. He believes that there must be some sort of mechanism to this effect (or maybe, I should say 'affect') that occurs in the wetware of our mind but not in digital computers or any kind of Turing computing device (ie something that can compute only the mathematically 'computable'). You see, within any 'computable' system of truth, there are always mathematical theorems - Godel theorems - that are 'provable' in the sense that an argument can be constructed that eventually makes it 'absolutely self evident' to an intelligent being that this "must be so" even though, at the same time, by any classic definition of 'computability' (ie any set of assumptions that build on each other to create theorem after theorem) they are possible to prove computably, ie by derivation from the assumptions. So, in this sense he shows that there are 'truths' out there that we are able to to perceive but that are not computable. (Or something like that). And, since the human mind, evidently is capable of perceiving these truths, it means that the human mind must not be a computer (or a computable device). And, therefore, by inference, true intelligence, can never be simulated on a computer, no matter how powerful.

So.. what does that mean to me you ask? Well, just maybe one of these new fangled technologies won't just be tremendously powerful and fast, it will be qualitatively different... and maybe, it will bridge this gap into the truly intelligent device. And, if that is so then I'm sure 'they' can help us (ie human civilization) extend our upward growth curve and continue to produce ever younger boy bands for a few more centuries (that is, until we all get enslaved by the AI "computers", which, by that time will seem only fair given all the terrible music we will've subjected them to in the meantime) ;)