Computer Technology

[Trev]

Originally Posted by EroticySteve

Does anyone else think that technology is at a standstill? Has innovation and invention died? Are the current computers we have everything, anyone could have ever imagined?

It seems that growing up Technology changed so fast that it was stupid to buy a computer when 12 months later your technology would be obsolete?

To me it seems as though there is little merit to innovation or discovery. Artificial intelligience offers some promise, perhaps a computer or enough computers could be used to solve and cure disease? Fix global warming. Create world peace? Normalize freak weather patterns. Communicate with beings on other planets? Figure out just how large the universe is. Does the Universe go on forever. Is it infinite?

One of those days I suppose.

Speed is getting better day by day, new chips in development will soon have every home pc something that NASA would envy.

[Dravyk]

The problem is the silicon pathways on the circuitboards can't currently go any smaller. Right now they are (I'm doing this from memory, so it's not exact) something like only a few microns above the atomic level. To go smaller, electrons would literally escape from the circuit tunnels, the spaces between atoms. (Again if the exact wording is wrong here, the context is correct.)

The next step we're getting closer to, but haven't achieved yet, where actual carbon atoms would need to be used that would take a charge and pass it down the line. The amazing thing is this would be similiar to how synapes and axioms in our nerves send signals to and from our organic brains.

So when we get down to that level, we're really going to be creating a true artificial structure that mimics nerve activity. What is also interesting (again, excuse me if I get the particulars a bit messed up) it was said years ago that the human brain can do 100 teraflops or roughly 100 trillion calculations per second. And we're on the threshold of computers doing that as well.

Interesting covergence there. Seems like androids will be just around the corner.