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.