Computer revolution 4.0

The first computing devices were mechanical machines with lots of wheels, cogs, rods and levers moving to perform operations on data. Electricity revolutionised these machines and valves replaced the wheels, cogs, rods and levers. Then the transistor came along and by putting many of those on a silicon chip the path to miniaturisation became an interstate. But soon, as computers became smaller and more powerful, our demands grew with it. A terabyte of memory will hold a couple of HD movies but together with our photo's, home-movies and music it's hardly enough anymore. Two terabyte will only buy us a few months more. We need more. And to play those HD movies and to play our HD games we need all the processing power we can get. It is beginning to look as though silicon and copper is not going to cut it much longer. We have reached the end of what the humble grain of sand can deliver.

Enter the next generation of computers. What that computer will look like still needs a bit of a look in a crystal ball but one can already see a few possible candidates for the most important elements of the machine: the processor, storage and communication.

The candidate for the processor would be the quantum computer. Dutch scientists of the University of Delft and the University of Eindhoven have discovered a way to better control the building blocks of such a quantum computer. These building blocks, called qubits, used to be controlled by a magnetic field which is very difficult to generate within a chip. The Dutch scientists have managed to use an electrical field to manipulate the qubits. On top of that they have managed to enclose these qubits in a piece of nanowire which essentially gives them a real building block to construct a computer with.

The next element of our fictitious future computer would be storage. It is great to have a super fast computer that spurts out data at a rate we can only dream of but where would we store all that data? At the rate we are consuming data storage now we are literally filling warehouses with bits and real estate is expensive which makes storage expensive. Enter the humble bacterium. Students of the Chinese University in Hong Kong are making headway in the technique of storing data in bacteria. They extract DNA from E. Coli bacteria - found in the lower intestine of nearly every warm blooded animal - make a small change to the DNA and put it back. Data stored. In this way 1 gram of bacteria can store the same amount of data as 900 terabyte drives. And it will last because every new generation of bacteria will carry the new, modified DNA. That way data can be stored for thousands of years. The students even built in encryption of the data. How about carrying your data in your belly? Pretty safe place to keep stuff, right? Only take care when you're taking anti-biotics, it may wipe your family photo's.

Then there is the sending of your ultra-HD family snaps to grandma on the other side of the globe. At the moment this is done with fibre-optics and satellites. But again thanks to quantum physics this can be done differently. Researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada have discovered a way to contain a quirk that has puzzled scientists for almost a hundred years. The entangled quantum state of photons can be reflected in two photons even while the photons are very far apart. In some mysterious way they communicate with each other. That communication we can use of course to transmit ones and zeroes over long distances. Until now though it had been impossible to garner any predictable success with this phenomenon. The researchers at the University of Calgary have now been able to contain this quirk and use it to our advantage. The beauty of this system is that there is no physical link between the photons and thus no way to tap into the data being transmitted. No snooping on your next Facebook chat then!

With these three elements it should be possible to build one heck of a computer. It will be fast and safe from prying eyes that wish to keep taps on your online activity. The overwhelming question though that is on any geek's lips will be: "But can it run Crysis?" I hazard a guess that the folks at Crytek will do their damnest to bring even this monster computer to its knees. And they will probably succeed. Which is a good thing: there's no sense in resting on one's laurels. On to computer revolution 5.0!

Robots with feeling

In an article in PCWorld an artificial 'E-skin' is described that may soon help robots feel. It can also be used to make prosthetic limbs with feeling abilities. The skin consists of semiconductor nanowires and works with low voltages. It can detect pressures low enough to be able to wash your precious China cups.

This is science fiction coming to life. Finally all those Asimov robots can become reality. Although Philip K. Dick's 'Do androids dream of electric sheep' (basis for the film 'Blade runner') paints a much darker future of course.

So robots will be able to feel in the near future. Or at least in one sense. In the other sense, the sense of feeling emotion, they are still wholly lacking. For how long though? It seems there is a drive towards trying to recreate life. Mary Shelley proved to be more than a little prescient when she wrote 'Frankenstein'. Mankind is trying very hard to recreate a being that can be called living. We have mechanical devices taking over heavy labour, building the objects that we crave. And robotic research is constantly striving to construct robots that are ever more self sufficient. Artificial Intelligence seems to be the hardest stumbling block but there is little doubt that with the advances in computer processor power and ever smarter algorithms a thinking computer is only decades away. If that.

And yet, and yet... Will we allow robots to become our overlords? Will robots want to be our overlords? Science fiction is full of stories that paint a dark future. I even write them myself. But is that picture a true one?

For a dark future ruled by malicious robots to come true we will have to create robots that either have no feeling and act purely on logic principles or robots that have actively malicious intend towards us. So as long as roboticists have read the Robot series by Asimov to learn the Three Laws of Robotics and have read 'Do androids dream of electric sheep' for the warning it contains, we may be safe. The only thing we need then is enough compassion and tolerance to accept our new earth-citizens. In that regard it may be that the greater problem lies with us, not with the robots.