Hit Refresh

by Satya Nadella

Like human intelligence, artificial intelligence can be categorized by layer. The bottom layer is simple pattern recognition. The middle layer is perception, sensing more and more complex scenes. It’s estimated that 99 percent of human perception is through speech and vision. Finally, the highest level of intelligence is cognition—deep understanding of human language.

Categorization of AI

Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone likely put it best: “You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead—your next stop, the Twilight Zone.”

Twilite zone series

Quantum computing is not only faster than conventional computing, but its workload obeys a different scaling law—rendering Moore’s Law little more than a quaint memory. Formulated by Intel founder Gordon Moore, Moore’s Law observes that the number of transistors in a device’s integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Some early supercomputers ran on around 13,000 transistors; the Xbox One in your living room contains 5 billion. But Intel in recent years has reported that the pace of advancement has slowed, creating tremendous demand for alternative ways to provide faster and faster processing to fuel the growth of AI. The short-term results are innovative accelerators like graphics-processing unit (GPU) farms, tensor-processing unit (TPU) chips, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the cloud. But the dream is a quantum computer. Today we have an urgent need to solve problems that would tie up classical computers for centuries, but that could be solved by a quantum computer in a few minutes or hours. For example, the speed and accuracy with which quantum computing could break today’s highest levels of encryption is mind-boggling. It would take a classical computer 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption, but a quantum computer could crack it in about a hundred seconds, or less than two minutes. Fortunately, quantum computing will also revolutionize classical computing encryption, leading to ever more secure computing. To get there we ne...

Quabtum Computing

To get a measure of how equitable or inequitable our world is, economists turn to the work of an Italian economist named Corrado Gini who in 1912 published his formula for calculating what has become known as the Gini coefficient, which measures the difference between a society’s division of income and a perfectly equal division of income. It’s really quite elegant. If 100 percent of a given population were to earn $1 per day, that would be absolute equality. If 100 percent earned $1 million per year, that too would be absolute equality. But when only 1 percent earn $1 million while everyone else earns nothing, we’re approaching absolute inequality.

Gini quotient

∑ (Education + Innovation) x Intensity of Tech Use = Economic Growth

Economic growth