he machine was shaped like a plus-sign and filled a large room. It was composed of 400,000 transistors and more than 100 miles of wiring. The CDC 6600 was a force to be reckoned with, the world’s first supercomputer that operated at speeds ten times faster than any other computer available in 1964. Ultimately, 100 of the machines were sold, even to clients beyond the usual government and military customers. Just five years later, the machine’s faster successor, the CDC 7600, toppled the machine’s 3,000,000 instructions per second speed record.
Supercomputers are just one of the machines that will make daily life easier in the future. As machinery and robotics improve faster than ever before, the changes in technology we can anticipate in the future are impressive. Humanoid robots will help take care of elderly populations while allowing them to live more independently. Drones will make it easier to give humans eyes in fields like emergency response and agriculture. 3D printing will revolutionize everything from the medical field to the culinary industry. The future of machine will look much different from the past, but the changes it promises will make life as we know it much easier.
Supercomputers
Supercomputers diverged from their less-super predecessors when multiple processors were linked together to perform multiple processing operations on datasets at the same time. As processor technology improves, supercomputers exhibit increases in speed. Additionally, the problems supercomputers can solve change as supercomputer technology changes. In the 1960s, the CDC 6600 offered “extremely fast solutions” to data processing problems. These early supercomputers only had a few processors; by the early 1990s, supercomputers had thousands. Today’s supercomputers can tackle a much wider range of challenges than the 1960s models. Supercomputers aid scientists in forecasting the weather and predicting climate change. They’ve helped study chemical reactions and researched anti-cancer therapies. And in the U.S., supercomputers maintain the functionality of the American nuclear arsenal in a country where testing nuclear weapons has been banned since 1992.
The future of supercomputers likely lies in the development of the world’s first exascale supercomputer. Computer speed is measured in flops, which determine how many operations the machine can perform per second. Laptop and desktop computers perform operations are capable of several teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second. The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently the fastest computer in the world, performing operations at 150 petaflops, several thousand times faster than a household computer. However, an exascale supercomputer would be capable of a quintillion calculations per second, one million times faster than a desktop computer.
Exascale computing is expected to dramatically advance scientific and artificial intelligence research. It will help scientists solve problems that couldn’t be solved before because the computer operations ran too long. Exascale computing will also allow researchers to run very large-scale simulations. Ultimately, exascale computing will help states optimize power grid performance, forecast water resources, and efficiently research a wide variety of disease conditions.
An Even More Super Computer
As impressive as exascale computing might be, quantum computing will almost certainly render it obsolete. Today’s computers and supercomputers use binary bits. This means that all of their digital data are optical or electrical pulses of 1s or 0s. In contrast, quantum computers can store data as qubits, which are composed of subatomic particles such as electrons or photons. Two properties of quantum computing—superposition and entanglement—mean that quantum computing has much more processing power than traditional binary computing.
Superposition means that qubit can represent multiple possible combinations of 1 or 0 simultaneously, allowing researchers to run through a vast number of possibilities in a dataset at lightning speed. Entanglement means that two qubits exist in the same quantum state at once, meaning that changing the state of one qubit “will instantaneously change the state of the other one in a predictable way.” In traditional computing, doubling the number of binary bits doubles its processing power. In quantum computing, entanglement allows increases in qubits to result in exponential increases in processing power. Together, the quantum properties of superposition and entanglement mean that quantum computing has the potential to be more powerful than any technology used in traditional supercomputing to date.
The challenges associated with quantum computing, however, are significant. Qubits are incredibly delicate, and the slightest change in their environment can stop them from functioning properly. The slightest disturbances (known as “noise”) can take qubits out of superposition before they have performed their assigned calculation. Researchers try to prevent noise by keeping qubits in vacuum chambers or super-cooled fridges.
However, noise still leads to errors in quantum computing, and the errors are difficult to fix. Manipulating a single qubit can lead to errors; when that qubit is entangled with others, the noise that results from the entanglement is multiplied. Additionally, once computer scientists master error correction in quantum computing, they will have to re-master every process they’ve already achieved in quantum computing.
If scientists are able to master a form of quantum computing that can combat potential errors like a regular computer system (despite the engineering challenges), the societal impact could be huge. Quantum computers can break decryption codes, which could hold many ramifications for data privacy and security. Additionally, with speeds “thousands of times” faster than traditional computers, quantum computers can significantly accelerate advances in AI that have been brought about by machine learning processes. Perhaps most notably, quantum computing can solve many problems that rely on detailed simulations, since the technology can simulate the behavior of matter, even at the molecular level. If researchers are able to harness quantum technology in future computing, the possibilities are endless.
Robots That Look Like Us
Another technology promising to change the future of problem solving is humanoid robots. Humanoid robots are often thought to be robots that resemble the human form, but that isn’t always the case. Some are only modeled after certain human body parts, such as a human head. Additionally, some experts say that with the cost of making robots, it would be sufficient for humanoid machines to merely relate and emote like humans, even if they didn’t look like them.
A few humanoid robots have already been developed within the last few years. Of these perhaps most notable is Sophia, the robot designed by Hanson Robotics and granted Saudi Arabian citizenship. Sophia can express fifty emotions and exhibits a sense of humor. Hanson Robotics notes that Sophia is designed to help people, and can be programmed to assist with “a wide range of physical interaction tasks.” And in Japan, Kodomoroid is a humanoid who works at the Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. She can speak a number of different languages and can read the news.
In the future, humanoid robots will be especially useful in caregiving jobs. They can help children on the autism spectrum learn social skills, since interacting with a robot might be easier for autistic children who are overstimulated by interaction with other humans. Humanoid robots working in this capacity are actually more effective when they look less human. Zeno, another humanoid created by Hanson Robotics, is currently used in autism research around the world, and has been used to help children on the spectrum learn arm motions and facial expressions. Zeno is much smaller than a person – at only 17” tall, he fits on a tabletop. Rather than looking like a person, he has a somewhat elf-like appearance, with bright green eyes and sharp zig-zags for eyebrows.
In addition to helping children with autism, humanoids can also be used to assist the elderly. Ri-Man, a humanoid built at Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), is strong enough to help lift people out of bed and is designed to help with household tasks. However, unlike with robots meant to help those on the autism spectrum, robots meant to help the elderly are more effective when they look more like humans, and as a result, humanoid homecare bots have not taken off in Japan. Even though Ri-Man can complete some human motions, with his green body and lifeless eyes, it is thought that his affect is off-putting to consumers.
Before help from humanoid robots can become mainstream, however, a variety of challenges must be overcome. Humanoid robots are built with actuators, motors that help humanoids mimic natural human movements. Actuators have to be programmed to carry a wide range of actions—dancing, throwing, walking, picking things up, etc. Humanoids additionally need a wide range of sensors to cover all five human senses. Specifically, sensors can help the humanoid make realistic facial expressions, and these sensors need to be programmed to display a wide array of emotions. Lastly, though AI technology has led to drastic improvements, the level at which humanoids can currently interact with humans is somewhat limited.
However, experts predict that these challenges can be overcome if money is invested into robot research and funding. Robots are already used in janitorial services and in hospitals. Many expect that they will become more popular within the next several years. Perhaps in the future, humanoid robots will find ways to help more people than they already have.
Solutions in the Sky
Drones are yet another machine that promises to change life as the world knows it. The term “drone” typically refers to a pilotless vehicle that uses technologies such as blank or artificial intelligence to operate autonomously.
The first pilotless vehicles were tested by the U.S. and the U.K. during the first world war, though they were never used operationally during the conflict. However, in years since, drones have been used in a variety of applications outside of the battlefield. Drones can use thermal imaging to look for missing people on the ground and track animals which might carry diseases like malaria. Operating from a high vantage point, drones can help researchers study vulnerable ecosystems or can help farmers use their land more efficiently. And during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, police in Spain even used drones to enforce social distancing.
In the future, drones will take an even larger role in some of these sectors. In agriculture, drones might help farmers supervise and spray their crops. In policing, it is expected that drones will help maintain police presence at large public events in the future. Drone usage is also expected to increase in emergency response efforts as well as in conservation efforts.
Drones offer advantages over human labor in many industries. For example, in emergency response work, it is often safer to send in a drone with supplies instead of a person. Additionally, drones with thermal imaging might have an easier time finding a person in danger from up above than first responders on the ground. Additionally, battery-powered drones are more environmentally friendly than aircrafts which use fuel and can reducing staffing costs in certain sectors.
However, there are still some challenges in drone engineering that need to be overcome if they are to play a more present role in daily life. Most commercial drones currently only have a battery life of a half hour, and it can take up to 90 minutes to recharge the battery. Additionally, in some areas (specifically large, open areas), drones might have difficulty receiving GPS signals, which might prevent the drone from making it home safely. These problems will need to be addressed before drones can be used in industries more frequently.
Printing the Future
When 3D printers were first invented in the 1980s, they were used to make thinks like polymer eye wash cups. Today, 3D printing is used in a wide variety of applications, to make everything from models of dinosaur bones in paleontology to airplane parts in aviation. In the future, 3D printing will likely be used for more futuristic ventures, taking over kitchens and changing modern medicine.
The first 3D printer used a technique known as stereolithography. Stereolithography can be used to create smaller prototypes of objects so that researchers can test the objects without investing time and money into making a full-size version. Objects made by stereolithography are printed layer by layer. After words, they’re rinsed in a solve and cured with ultra-violet light. Later 3D printing technology would use lasers to fused powder polymers into objects. Today’s most common 3D printing technology, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), forms objects by heating a cable of thermoplastic and extruding the material in layers.
3D printing is powerful because it allows people to make basically anything via a simple computer file. In medicine, 3D printing is allowing doctors and researchers to make giant strides in prosthetics. In Sudan, Not Impossible Labs operates Project Daniel, an organization which 3D prints affordable prosthetics for victims of violence. Physicians can also use 3D printing to make surgical models they can practice on before going into surgery on a live patient. Additionally, the medical field has been able to produce 3D printed “hearing aids, artificial teeth, and bone grafts.” In the future, physicians hope that 3D printers will be able to produce functional artificial organs, which will be lifesaving in a world where many die on organ donation waitlists. The 3D printers that will be used to print layers of cells are already in the R&D phase. So far, researchers have been able to duplicate patches of tissue that resembles certain organs but have yet to print a full-functioning organ.
Food printing is another area of 3D printing that might expand in the future. A 3D food printer called the Cornucopia was designed at MIT, and The French Culinary Institute has used a 3D printer developed at Cornell to print “artistic delicacies.” Currently, 3D food printing is being used in German nursing home to make appetizing meals of mashed carrots, broccoli, and sweet peas for elderly residents who have difficulty chewing and have resisted unappetizing pureed food options. Further, the future possibilities created by 3D printing food are vast. Some researchers think they could help create palatable snacks out of plentiful but currently unpalatable materials such as algae or grass. Such a technique could help offer more eco-friendly solutions to feed a growing global population.
a global affairs media network
Exploring the Machines of Tomorrow
December 29, 2020
We are constructing a futuristic society which is populated by autonomous flying machines, houses are printed on-demand, and our companions are highly evolved robots. These advancements are allowing us to re-imagine and re-engineer our world. Here we explore the machines of the not-so-far future.
T
he machine was shaped like a plus-sign and filled a large room. It was composed of 400,000 transistors and more than 100 miles of wiring. The CDC 6600 was a force to be reckoned with, the world’s first supercomputer that operated at speeds ten times faster than any other computer available in 1964. Ultimately, 100 of the machines were sold, even to clients beyond the usual government and military customers. Just five years later, the machine’s faster successor, the CDC 7600, toppled the machine’s 3,000,000 instructions per second speed record.
Supercomputers are just one of the machines that will make daily life easier in the future. As machinery and robotics improve faster than ever before, the changes in technology we can anticipate in the future are impressive. Humanoid robots will help take care of elderly populations while allowing them to live more independently. Drones will make it easier to give humans eyes in fields like emergency response and agriculture. 3D printing will revolutionize everything from the medical field to the culinary industry. The future of machine will look much different from the past, but the changes it promises will make life as we know it much easier.
Supercomputers
Supercomputers diverged from their less-super predecessors when multiple processors were linked together to perform multiple processing operations on datasets at the same time. As processor technology improves, supercomputers exhibit increases in speed. Additionally, the problems supercomputers can solve change as supercomputer technology changes. In the 1960s, the CDC 6600 offered “extremely fast solutions” to data processing problems. These early supercomputers only had a few processors; by the early 1990s, supercomputers had thousands. Today’s supercomputers can tackle a much wider range of challenges than the 1960s models. Supercomputers aid scientists in forecasting the weather and predicting climate change. They’ve helped study chemical reactions and researched anti-cancer therapies. And in the U.S., supercomputers maintain the functionality of the American nuclear arsenal in a country where testing nuclear weapons has been banned since 1992.
The future of supercomputers likely lies in the development of the world’s first exascale supercomputer. Computer speed is measured in flops, which determine how many operations the machine can perform per second. Laptop and desktop computers perform operations are capable of several teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second. The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently the fastest computer in the world, performing operations at 150 petaflops, several thousand times faster than a household computer. However, an exascale supercomputer would be capable of a quintillion calculations per second, one million times faster than a desktop computer.
Exascale computing is expected to dramatically advance scientific and artificial intelligence research. It will help scientists solve problems that couldn’t be solved before because the computer operations ran too long. Exascale computing will also allow researchers to run very large-scale simulations. Ultimately, exascale computing will help states optimize power grid performance, forecast water resources, and efficiently research a wide variety of disease conditions.
An Even More Super Computer
As impressive as exascale computing might be, quantum computing will almost certainly render it obsolete. Today’s computers and supercomputers use binary bits. This means that all of their digital data are optical or electrical pulses of 1s or 0s. In contrast, quantum computers can store data as qubits, which are composed of subatomic particles such as electrons or photons. Two properties of quantum computing—superposition and entanglement—mean that quantum computing has much more processing power than traditional binary computing.
Superposition means that qubit can represent multiple possible combinations of 1 or 0 simultaneously, allowing researchers to run through a vast number of possibilities in a dataset at lightning speed. Entanglement means that two qubits exist in the same quantum state at once, meaning that changing the state of one qubit “will instantaneously change the state of the other one in a predictable way.” In traditional computing, doubling the number of binary bits doubles its processing power. In quantum computing, entanglement allows increases in qubits to result in exponential increases in processing power. Together, the quantum properties of superposition and entanglement mean that quantum computing has the potential to be more powerful than any technology used in traditional supercomputing to date.
The challenges associated with quantum computing, however, are significant. Qubits are incredibly delicate, and the slightest change in their environment can stop them from functioning properly. The slightest disturbances (known as “noise”) can take qubits out of superposition before they have performed their assigned calculation. Researchers try to prevent noise by keeping qubits in vacuum chambers or super-cooled fridges.
However, noise still leads to errors in quantum computing, and the errors are difficult to fix. Manipulating a single qubit can lead to errors; when that qubit is entangled with others, the noise that results from the entanglement is multiplied. Additionally, once computer scientists master error correction in quantum computing, they will have to re-master every process they’ve already achieved in quantum computing.
If scientists are able to master a form of quantum computing that can combat potential errors like a regular computer system (despite the engineering challenges), the societal impact could be huge. Quantum computers can break decryption codes, which could hold many ramifications for data privacy and security. Additionally, with speeds “thousands of times” faster than traditional computers, quantum computers can significantly accelerate advances in AI that have been brought about by machine learning processes. Perhaps most notably, quantum computing can solve many problems that rely on detailed simulations, since the technology can simulate the behavior of matter, even at the molecular level. If researchers are able to harness quantum technology in future computing, the possibilities are endless.
Robots That Look Like Us
Another technology promising to change the future of problem solving is humanoid robots. Humanoid robots are often thought to be robots that resemble the human form, but that isn’t always the case. Some are only modeled after certain human body parts, such as a human head. Additionally, some experts say that with the cost of making robots, it would be sufficient for humanoid machines to merely relate and emote like humans, even if they didn’t look like them.
A few humanoid robots have already been developed within the last few years. Of these perhaps most notable is Sophia, the robot designed by Hanson Robotics and granted Saudi Arabian citizenship. Sophia can express fifty emotions and exhibits a sense of humor. Hanson Robotics notes that Sophia is designed to help people, and can be programmed to assist with “a wide range of physical interaction tasks.” And in Japan, Kodomoroid is a humanoid who works at the Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. She can speak a number of different languages and can read the news.
In the future, humanoid robots will be especially useful in caregiving jobs. They can help children on the autism spectrum learn social skills, since interacting with a robot might be easier for autistic children who are overstimulated by interaction with other humans. Humanoid robots working in this capacity are actually more effective when they look less human. Zeno, another humanoid created by Hanson Robotics, is currently used in autism research around the world, and has been used to help children on the spectrum learn arm motions and facial expressions. Zeno is much smaller than a person – at only 17” tall, he fits on a tabletop. Rather than looking like a person, he has a somewhat elf-like appearance, with bright green eyes and sharp zig-zags for eyebrows.
In addition to helping children with autism, humanoids can also be used to assist the elderly. Ri-Man, a humanoid built at Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), is strong enough to help lift people out of bed and is designed to help with household tasks. However, unlike with robots meant to help those on the autism spectrum, robots meant to help the elderly are more effective when they look more like humans, and as a result, humanoid homecare bots have not taken off in Japan. Even though Ri-Man can complete some human motions, with his green body and lifeless eyes, it is thought that his affect is off-putting to consumers.
Before help from humanoid robots can become mainstream, however, a variety of challenges must be overcome. Humanoid robots are built with actuators, motors that help humanoids mimic natural human movements. Actuators have to be programmed to carry a wide range of actions—dancing, throwing, walking, picking things up, etc. Humanoids additionally need a wide range of sensors to cover all five human senses. Specifically, sensors can help the humanoid make realistic facial expressions, and these sensors need to be programmed to display a wide array of emotions. Lastly, though AI technology has led to drastic improvements, the level at which humanoids can currently interact with humans is somewhat limited.
However, experts predict that these challenges can be overcome if money is invested into robot research and funding. Robots are already used in janitorial services and in hospitals. Many expect that they will become more popular within the next several years. Perhaps in the future, humanoid robots will find ways to help more people than they already have.
Solutions in the Sky
Drones are yet another machine that promises to change life as the world knows it. The term “drone” typically refers to a pilotless vehicle that uses technologies such as blank or artificial intelligence to operate autonomously.
The first pilotless vehicles were tested by the U.S. and the U.K. during the first world war, though they were never used operationally during the conflict. However, in years since, drones have been used in a variety of applications outside of the battlefield. Drones can use thermal imaging to look for missing people on the ground and track animals which might carry diseases like malaria. Operating from a high vantage point, drones can help researchers study vulnerable ecosystems or can help farmers use their land more efficiently. And during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, police in Spain even used drones to enforce social distancing.
In the future, drones will take an even larger role in some of these sectors. In agriculture, drones might help farmers supervise and spray their crops. In policing, it is expected that drones will help maintain police presence at large public events in the future. Drone usage is also expected to increase in emergency response efforts as well as in conservation efforts.
Drones offer advantages over human labor in many industries. For example, in emergency response work, it is often safer to send in a drone with supplies instead of a person. Additionally, drones with thermal imaging might have an easier time finding a person in danger from up above than first responders on the ground. Additionally, battery-powered drones are more environmentally friendly than aircrafts which use fuel and can reducing staffing costs in certain sectors.
However, there are still some challenges in drone engineering that need to be overcome if they are to play a more present role in daily life. Most commercial drones currently only have a battery life of a half hour, and it can take up to 90 minutes to recharge the battery. Additionally, in some areas (specifically large, open areas), drones might have difficulty receiving GPS signals, which might prevent the drone from making it home safely. These problems will need to be addressed before drones can be used in industries more frequently.
Printing the Future
When 3D printers were first invented in the 1980s, they were used to make thinks like polymer eye wash cups. Today, 3D printing is used in a wide variety of applications, to make everything from models of dinosaur bones in paleontology to airplane parts in aviation. In the future, 3D printing will likely be used for more futuristic ventures, taking over kitchens and changing modern medicine.
The first 3D printer used a technique known as stereolithography. Stereolithography can be used to create smaller prototypes of objects so that researchers can test the objects without investing time and money into making a full-size version. Objects made by stereolithography are printed layer by layer. After words, they’re rinsed in a solve and cured with ultra-violet light. Later 3D printing technology would use lasers to fused powder polymers into objects. Today’s most common 3D printing technology, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), forms objects by heating a cable of thermoplastic and extruding the material in layers.
3D printing is powerful because it allows people to make basically anything via a simple computer file. In medicine, 3D printing is allowing doctors and researchers to make giant strides in prosthetics. In Sudan, Not Impossible Labs operates Project Daniel, an organization which 3D prints affordable prosthetics for victims of violence. Physicians can also use 3D printing to make surgical models they can practice on before going into surgery on a live patient. Additionally, the medical field has been able to produce 3D printed “hearing aids, artificial teeth, and bone grafts.” In the future, physicians hope that 3D printers will be able to produce functional artificial organs, which will be lifesaving in a world where many die on organ donation waitlists. The 3D printers that will be used to print layers of cells are already in the R&D phase. So far, researchers have been able to duplicate patches of tissue that resembles certain organs but have yet to print a full-functioning organ.
Food printing is another area of 3D printing that might expand in the future. A 3D food printer called the Cornucopia was designed at MIT, and The French Culinary Institute has used a 3D printer developed at Cornell to print “artistic delicacies.” Currently, 3D food printing is being used in German nursing home to make appetizing meals of mashed carrots, broccoli, and sweet peas for elderly residents who have difficulty chewing and have resisted unappetizing pureed food options. Further, the future possibilities created by 3D printing food are vast. Some researchers think they could help create palatable snacks out of plentiful but currently unpalatable materials such as algae or grass. Such a technique could help offer more eco-friendly solutions to feed a growing global population.
