Right now it seems like its “A.I.”. Still big now are the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Recently we had COVID 19.
What’s next?
Right now it seems like its “A.I.”. Still big now are the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Recently we had COVID 19.
What’s next?
In 1940, Thomas Watson, president of IBM, said the world would ever need at most 5 computers
In 1940 I would have agreed. Nobody had any idea they could be small, fast or convenient. Nobody had even bothered to build one outside of Germany, with ENIAC still a few years away, and synthetic semiconductors hadn’t been invented, so he was picturing thousands of tubes that would have to be changed out constantly. Five was actually a bold estimate, it’s like saying “only 5 space elevators” today.
Also, that’s not actually a response to what I said. It’s just another anecdote about someone being wrong once.
True, I thought the response could be inferred. What I meant to say is that you can’t make proper predictions with any degree of certainty about future developments with the scopes of current knowledge. Like superconductors for computers, someone could invent something equivalent to a quantum superconductor which would propel the advancement of quantum computers forward by decades.
Meeting that description would be a material with fractional-spin quasiparticals, and yeah, building a quantum computer would be easy with those. Otherwise, it seems likely we’ll get them in the 30’s, or maybe even late this decade.
That’s not the issue, though. There might well be no helpful algorithms that exist for the thing, outside of research applications like simulating quantum systems. It could only ever be the next big thing for certain scientists unless that fundamentally changes. You’re right, I can’t say for certain that it won’t, but it’s not a good guess.
Broken encryption might be the next big thing, but that’s actually a negative. In my response I put down post-quantum cryptography as a possibility, just based on how I interpret the question.