What am I referring to when I say The Singularity? The technological revolution, when humans reach the inflection point where growth becomes uncontrollable & irreversible. Read about it below as I’ll be explaining a little bit about Quantum & AI.
Now full disclosure, I am not by any means an expert in this category. I consider myself to be an avid learner of humanity’s progress & future projection. Anyone can do this, You can do this. We have a plethora of knowledge available to us right at our fingertips. If this entices you, please consider leveraging the tools available online & joining me in seeking out the latest & greatest.
How I started.
After my friend explained to me the basics of what is quantum, I bought my first quantum physics book in freshman year of high school. If you search on Google what quantum is, it will give you the answer but in confusing terms. Quantum as all normal humans should understand it is the study of matter at the subatomic level. When we go from average day, to the microscopic level, things change. When we go down to the subatomic level, things get “weird”. The properties of physics change, matter doesn’t react the same way as we think it should.
What does this have to do with AI & the future?
If I told you to research how active Nvidia & AMD are in the fields of quantum & AI, would you do it? Because if those companies don’t do their research, they’ll be in trouble. Why? Two words, “Moore’s Law”. All big players in chip manufacturing are well aware of Moore’s Law, & I’m sure it scares them. Moore’s Law is the rate of adding transistors to silicone-based chips.. We have relied on that law as a factor for future growth in computing power, & it held true for decades, until we completely outpaced it. However there is a point where growth in computing power will go from vast changes, to nominal efficiency changes in the coming few years.
Why?
Because we’ve reached the point where transistors are 10-29 nanometers in scale, within the next few years we’ll bring that down to 5-7 nanometers. But that’s it!
Remember how we spoke about Quantum?
At this scale, quantum comes into play, because transistors become so small, their properties will now be affected by the quantum realm. This means that the next few generations of conventional computers will see efficiency upgrades instead of fundamental upgrades. Bad news for researchers who rely on supercomputers to model out the most important problems we face today like Climate Change. But this is where all chip manufacturers should be looking into quantum computing.
What is Quantum Computing?
Let’s first start with conventional computing, at the most basic premise, computers process data as 1s & 0s, 1 being On & 0 being Off. This forms the fundamental for how our computers work. But with Quantum computing, things change. Quantum superposition comes into play, where quantum computers will be in a superposition, meaning they will be 1 & 0 at the same time.
If correctly harnessed, we would see an astronomical growth in computing power. Which should be the way we go.
How does AI play into this?
One component of AI is machine learning, that is an analytical model building through a large data set. Meaning we feed data to the AI system, it reads the data & also figures out how to improve itself at the same time. With current computing power & the large sets of data we want the machines to search through, we’re being disappointed with the bottleneck in conventional computing power. That is where quantum computing can save the day. With quantum computing, we could vastly increase the efficiency of machine learning, which would in-turn help our AI programs better themselves.
The takeaway.
To sum it all up, the current trajectory of conventional computing is headed towards a decline. With research into *true* quantum computers, we can use them congruent to our AI programs to head further towards The Singularity.
