A Report From 2013

The Saturation Of

Moore's Law

Los Angeles, February

12, 2013

As predicted over a decade ago, Moore's

Law, which had so amazed the late Twentieth century, is running out. The unofficial law,

which stated that computing power would double every 18 months or so, has held true for

over three decades. However, over the last two years, no significant growth has been

noticed in CPU performance. Intel physicists have been pointing out for some time that

current component densities cannot be increased any further for the traditional silicon

VLSI (the so-called Very Large Scale Integration) technology. In any case, Wintel 4, the

current CPU, contains considerably more switches per cubic centimeter than the human

brain, they pointed out. While there are reports that organic semiconducting devices could

achieve higher speed, scientists feel that it will be a decade at least till practical

devices can be constructed. It looks as though the Wintel 4, running at 4.8 GHz, will

continue to be the processing power available on PCs for some years to come.

A similar saturation has been visible for

some time in Random Access Memory (RAM) sizes. The 1 GB RAM has been the standard for last

three years. While there is no restriction on adding more RAM, analysts feel that the

current operating systems are unable to utilize the current RAM adequately and there is

little justification for increasing it further.

With the saturation of Moore's Law, it is

expected that the PC will remain unchanged with a continuously dropping price. The current

$ 200 barrier is expected to last for not more than two years.

align="right" hspace="0" width="181" height="269"> face="Arial">Self-configuring Systems Herald The End Of SW Development

Vienna, May 25, 2012

Construction agents that can

put together objects and components to configure complete systems are beginning to

threaten the software development industry. Just as desktop publishing ended the

profession of phototype setting operators in the mid-eighties, the profession of

programming too seems to be at the end of its tether. From being the gurus of the

information age in nineties, the computer programmer's position in organizations has

declined steadily. At present, the programmer's job is to assemble objects into systems.

For a while the systems designers were important till cognitive agents of the 2001 began

to demonstrate combinatorial creativity. Database applications were the first to feel the

impact of this technology since such transaction processing systems are the easiest to

specify and require the simplest of interfaces. Oracle Corp. began the transition in the

year 2000 with its dialog agent that could configure an RDBMS application through a dialog

with the enduser. Microsoft's do-or-die was a leap forward in self-configuration with an

agent that would not only create a database application but also continuously improve its

performance over time through 'children' of the original agent that would survive only if

the application got better.

Games manufacturers fell next

to Agent technology with the Japanese Sugata Agent from Sony that would build games from

existing resources on the Internet while continuously monitoring what the (human) player

wanted.

It is clear that computers

would assemble their own programs entirely without human intervention by the beginning of

the 22 century, maybe even as early as 2050.

Are Cognitive

Systems A Threat?

New Delhi, December

15, 2008

Cognitive Systems that have been improving

steadily since the late nineties may now pose a threat to humanity, said U Pawar, a young

researcher on the subject. In a crowded plenary at the 14th International Conference on

Cognitive Systems (ICCS'08), she claimed that such systems could be beginning to possess

emergent behavior directed more toward their own survival rather than the original human

objective.

Cognitive systems were first defined in the

year 1999 as systems that respond to the physics of the external environment as well as

the psychophysics of the human user. In the first phase this resulted in computers that

could sense heat, light, and sound in their environment as well as recognize users from

their voices, keyboard using pattern, and mouse usage.

Cognitive systems acquired their adaptive

characteristics in early 2002 in the erstwhile Pakistan. These systems would modify their

behavior depending on the state of the environment and the user. It is ironic that the

country that had invented computer virus ended data security problem through systems that

would recognize their owners and adapt to them. The effort was unfortunately interrupted

by several years with the breaking up of Pakistan into Bakistan and Tutistan.

Self-modifying cognitive systems emerged

next from the poverty-ridden universities of Britain. However, like most British

inventions they did not realize their full commercial potential in the country of their

birth.

The action shifted to United Korea in the

year 2006 with the now infamous Isaac program. Built as an electronic pet the program was

not only adaptive to both the environment and the users but also capable of

self-reproduction and mutation. Isaac was capable of connecting to the Internet and

released itself into the WWW at some unspecified date. The subsequent monstrous Internet

Nessies are now history and we have all learned to live with them.

Although there is legislation against

self-replicating programs, there is little one can do to wish them away. In fact, some

anthropologists have said that the human race is the first sentient species to have

created another.