Let’s be bold for a moment and suppose that a smaller, cheaper, simpler way is found to read data out of a molecular array, and the array can be made from a substance stable at room temperature. At this point, the consequences become truly mind-boggling … you could store the complete texts of a billion books. Online access to reference sources would become irrelevant; each of us could own the Library of Congress, every piece of music ever recorded, plus immaculate digital reproductions of art from every museum in the world. Meanwhile, every domestic device, from a sound system to a hair brush, could possess artificial intelligence at a human level or beyond.
Predictor: Lloyd, Seth
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Charles Platt interviews Seth Lloyd of MIT about potential new leaps in computing, and thus networking, power. Platt writes: ”Looking ahead, if quantum computation becomes at all viable, it could certainly be used in tomorrow’s supercomputers to handle massive tasks such as code breaking or weather forecasting. But let’s be bold for a moment and suppose that a smaller, cheaper, simpler way is found to read data out of a molecular array, and the array can be made from a substance stable at room temperature. At this point, the consequences become truly mind-boggling. It has been calculated that the human brain stores about 10,000 billion bits of information in the cerebral cortex. If this is so, Seth Lloyd’s grain of salt could theoretically hold all of a person’s memories with room to spare. Alternatively, you could store the complete texts of a billion books. Online access to reference sources would become irrelevant; each of us could own the Library of Congress, every piece of music ever recorded, plus immaculate digital reproductions of art from every museum in the world. Meanwhile, every domestic device, from a sound system to a hair brush, could possess artificial intelligence at a human level or beyond … The energy states of an electron are called ‘quantum states’ because on the atomic scale, energy exists in whole units known as ‘quanta.’ Similarly, on the most fundamental level, digital computers use zeroes and ones with no fractional states in between. Therefore, it seems ideal to use a low electron energy state to represent numeral 0 and a higher energy state to represent numeral 1. Unfortunately, an electron isn’t a stable place to store data. Its energy state may be affected by heat, vibration, and other outside interference; or the electron may spontaneously reduce its energy state by emitting a photon. These problems may be overcome, but it will take another two or three years to test the basic concepts with laboratory experiments. And even if the experiments are a success, we could easily wait two decades before seeing quantum computers for sale to the general consumer.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: A Million MHz CPU? If Seth Lloyd’s Right, Someday We’ll Have ‘Quantum Computers’ 100 million Times More Powerful Than Today’s Pentium-Based PC
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.03/limits_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney