Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

So when will we have true HAL-esque AI? It’s hard to say. But IBM recently unveiled two new chip technologies that move us in this direction. The first integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon. These chips communicate with light. Electrical signals require electrons, which generate heat, which limits the amount of work a chip can perform and requires a lot of power for cooling. Light has neither limitation. If IBM’s estimations are correct, over the next eight years, its new chip design will accelerate supercomputer performance a thousandfold, taking us from our current 2.6 petaflops to an exaflop (that’s 10 to the 18th, or a quintillion operations per second)—or one hundred times faster than the human brain. The second is SyNAPSE, Big Blue’s brain-mimicking silicon chip. Each chip has a grid of 256 parallel wires representing dendrites and a perpendicular set of wires for axons. Where these wires intersect are the synapses and one chip has 262,144 of them. In preliminary tests, the chips were able to play a game of Pong, control a virtual car on a racecourse, and identify an image drawn on a screen. These are all tasks that computers have accomplished before, but these new chips don’t need specialized programs to complete each task; instead they respond to real-world circumstances and learn from their experience. Certainly there’s no guarantee that these things will be enough to create HAL—strong AI may require more than just a brute force so...