Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

by Michio Kaku

Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.

So the collapse of Moore’s law is a matter of international importance, with trillions of dollars at stake. But precisely how it will end, and what will replace it, depends on the laws of physics.

Second, there is virtually no limit to the amount of information you can place on a laser beam. Light waves, because they vibrate much faster than sound waves, can carry vastly more information than sound.

Hence, the amount of information you can cram onto a wave increases the faster you vibrate it, that is, by increasing its frequency.)

Around 2020 or soon afterward, Moore’s law will gradually cease to hold true and Silicon Valley may slowly turn into a rust belt unless a replacement technology is found.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you cannot know both the position and velocity of any particle. This may sound counterintuitive, but at the atomic level you simply cannot know where the electron is, so it can never be confined precisely in an ultrathin wire or layer and it necessarily leaks out, causing the circuit to short-circuit. We will discuss this in more detail in Chapter 4, when we analyze nanotechnology. For the rest of this chapter, we will assume that physicists have found a successor to silicon power, but that computer power grows at a much slower pace than before. Computers will most likely continue to grow exponentially, but the doubling time will not be eighteen months, but many years.

For example, if you are an actor, musician, or performer who has to memorize large amounts of material, in the future you will see all the lines or music in your lens. You won’t need teleprompters, cue cards, sheet music, or notes to remind you. You will not need to memorize anything anymore.

If you are a student and missed a lecture, you will be able to download lectures given by virtual professors on any subject and watch them. Via telepresence, an image of a real professor could appear in front of you and answer any questions you may have. You will also be able to see demonstrations of experiments, videos, etc., via your lens.

This means you would not need a cell phone, clocks or watches, or MP3 players anymore.

Many of the appliances and gadgets you have at home can be replaced by augmented reality.

Since chips will cost less than bar codes, every commercial product will have its own intelligent label you can access and scan.

The translation won’t be perfect, since there are always problems with idioms, slang, and colorful expressions, but it will be good enough so you will understand the gist of what that person is saying.

require a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of the language. The field is called CAT (computer assisted translation).

They attach electrodes to the neck and face of the speaker; these pick up the contraction of the muscles and decipher the words being spoken. Their work does not require any audio equipment, since the words can be mouthed silently.

“The idea is that you can mouth words in English and they will come out in Chinese or another language,” says Tanja Schultz,

In the future, it might be possible for a computer to lip-read the person you are talking to, so the electrodes are not necessary. So, in principle, it is possible to have two people having a lively conversation, although they speak in two different languages.

Although augmented reality opens up an entirely new world, there are limitations. The problem will not be one of hardware; nor is bandwidth a limiting factor, since there is no limit to the amount of information that can be carried by fiber-optic cables. The real bottleneck is software.

Creating software can be done only the old-fashioned way. A human—sitting quietly in a chair with a pencil, paper, and laptop—is going to have to write the codes, line for line, that make these imaginary worlds come to life. One can mass-produce hardware and increase its power by piling on more and more chips, but you cannot mass-produce the brain. This means that the introduction of a truly augmented world will take decades, until midcentury.

Recently, he embarked on an ambitious plan to launch the Singularity University, based in the NASA Ames laboratory in the Bay Area, which trains a cadre of scientists to prepare for the coming singularity.

It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.”

Since many AI researchers are former physicists, there is something called “physics envy,” that is, the desire to find the single, unifying theme underlying all intelligence.

Science is the engine of prosperity, so how will it reshape civilization and wealth in the future?

In Europe, however, a great awakening was beginning. Trade brought in fresh, revolutionary ideas, accelerated by Gutenberg’s printing press. The power of the Church began to weaken after a millennium of domination. The universities slowly turned their attention away from interpreting obscure passages of the Bible to applying the physics of Newton and the chemistry of Dalton and others.

If you do not master the latest in science and technology, then your competitors will.