We have all grown up watching science fiction stories in books or movies. We have dreamed of computers we interact with and how our lives would magically become much easier. What we get to witness is how this becomes reality – well sort of.
There are a number of things that are going on out there to bring these magical dreams to our lives. Reality will all come in steps initially, but they will develop into waves as time progresses. The things that have help this magic develop are computing speed and computing memory capacity. Over the last ten years we have witnessed the memory capacity for computing drop in price (including cloud computing). All of which has made it possible for us to save incredible volumes of data. Microchip speeds, also, have become faster and faster while at the same time becoming cheaper and cheaper for each of us. Increased speed and memory are all selling features in the newest hardware being offered to us in the marketplace.
These two things have opened up the doors to our imaginations. Hence the development of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning (“AI”), Facial Recognition or even Quantum computers. These have seen incredible developments over a very rapid period.
AI has crept into all of our lives. We witness it when we go onto a website to shop. The next time we log onto our computer, magically we see advertising for a product just like the ones we were looking at yesterday. The monitoring of what we see teaches the “internet” about what our preferences are and what we are interested in buying. This herds the consumer towards a targeted vendor.
Work is being done to create a system to learn and monitor our parents health and wellbeing using AI. All of this technology would assist caregivers in recognizing the early signs of dementia and to expand the quality of elderly care. Expect these machines to be coming to us very soon.
The Chinese Government has been working on facial recognition to become more Orwellian by monitoring its own population. Control of their masses is their goal. This use of technology highlights the negative side, but there are some good uses for this technology too. If you own an iPhone you have it now. Google has added facial recognition to the Nest Hub device. Together with AI it can be a useful option for good. If in trustworthy hands, we will have time saving and useful information at our hands quickly.
Quantum computing, from a practical standpoint, is not within the everyday use for us mere mortals and is some time away. So was flight a mere hundred years or so ago too, but the Wright brothers conquered that issue. Quantum Computing has practicality for very specific problems or specific users today. Tomorrow though it seems as this technology develops and costs decrease it will flow into our lives.
All of these technologies are interesting and makes those science fiction dreams seem to be within our grasp.
Like all things from flight to AI as time progresses things become within our grasp and somehow filter into our day to day lives.
