The Extent of our Technology

The focus of this article is going to be post-modern technology and how we have hit a technological limit in terms of our processing speed and power. For the past 5 decades, our technological capabilities have been increasing at an exponential rate, especially the power of our processors. The problem, however, exists when we require optimization. These problems even for our computers at this stage is incredibly hard. Optimization is the process of making an occupation or job more efficient.

Since about the 1960’s our technology has progressed at a rough rate of doubling processor speed every 2 years. This is the minimum increase of power for technology. This phenomenon was predicted by a man named Gordon Moore who stated, “every 2 years the number of transistors placed on a board will double”, thus leading to at least a double in processing speed.  His “law” is approaching a standstill. This is a problem as our computers may stop becoming faster. The following image is an example of Moore’s law.

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At this point, “supercomputers”, which were the size of a modern-day large Air Conditioner standing vertically in the 70’s, are nowadays as compact as something which can be held in our hands. Our mobiles, however, are still more powerful than supercomputers of the 70’s. Computers today can have multiple uses, and for the ordinary human, they serve for all our wants and needs. Not everyone buys a computer just for a speed upgrade. But technologically we always want to upgrade. This is not a problem for the average computer user, but a problem for scientific and logistical processes. This is due to our transistors getting too small.

A transistor in its most basic form in a computer allows electrons to pass through in order to process data. What passes through are known as bits. In the digital computer via Transistor – Transistor Logic. The data can be stored in 2 forms of numbers 0’s and 1’s. The transistor recognizes this via the input voltage. For the value of the 0 bit, the transistor receives an Input voltage of 0.7 volts or below. Any voltage ranging from 2.2 and above is inputted into the system as a 1 bit. For the output values for the system to acknowledge the bit no voltage above 0.4 is recognized as a 0 bit and any voltage above 2.6 is recognized as a 1 bit. However, this varies for older models as different sizes require different charges for recognition of different bits. Smaller transistors require less power as there will always be more of them. So a lot of smaller transistors require way less power as they are placed much closer compared to bigger ones which are placed much further and require more power to operate.

Our computers are reaching a technological limit. Our transistors size has progressed from 65 micrometers from almost 2 decades ago, and just about 2 years ago we started to use 14-nanometer transistors. We are close to hitting a wall for our processing capabilities. The problem is that our computer parts are reaching the size of an atom, this includes transistors. Once things reach this level of microscopy, normal or classical physics stop to apply.  The laws of Quantum mechanics and quantum physics starts to take effect. These properties require us to completely rethink our computers design and what they can do.

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A Quantum computer is like a normal computer in some ways. But harnesses the quantum properties of matter. Examples of this are superposition, entanglement, energy transfer and magnetism to make it work. Another key difference is that this can do multiple calculations at a much faster speed at the same time. This is due to a quantum property, electrons/qubits are moving in all directions until it is measured, which also means whilst it is moving in all directions, it could be performing the calculation at an incredibly fast rate. To put this into perspective, Google suggested that a quantum computer capable of using only 50 qubits would surpass the processing speed of a conventional supercomputer. The only downside to this computer is that it is quite expensive and only has commercial use. The reason the processing is so fast is due to the superposition properties of qubits. Superposition is a singular thing at 2 states or places at once. Think of it as a pair of gloves. The right glove is sent to one side of the world and the left one is sent to Russia both of them are correspondent to each other. The single moment the right glove is seen the other has 100% chance of being the left-hand glove. This way in a quantum computer 2 qubits is equivalent to 4 classical bit on the small scale but when the number of qubits is raised they the processing speed of computers become infinitely more powerful.

This sort of technology can be used in multiple fields such as maths, science, forensics and financial services. A Quantum computer can compute and can run different situations, with different values each time and store it without losing it due to the super storage capacity of the qubits. This could be very useful for medicine. Since medicine has many different chemicals and properties the computer can simulate these chemical reactions to speed up analysis time and factors in the digital environment can be controlled much better, this also would shred down medicine testing times which would be a major game changer in the medical field.

Companies like Google and NASA are using this technology to simulate things such as a hydrogen atom. This could be used for chemical testing as factors in the computer can be kept absolutely controlled and lead to faster and more accurate testing which can help humans progress further if we ever reach a point where we cannot synthesize elements. Using a Quantum computer, we can test these things. This would be the scientific uses of a quantum computer.

In the financial sector, it can help predict market activity by inputting stock prices and peoples information on investment history to predict the market and company stock price. Which could be useful for companies when they are giving stocks to people so they can efficiently see who can make the most profit for companies. Although this very expensive as it is behavioral data.

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This is Beneficial to companies such as Google, NASA, FBI, CIA, and CSI. as well as many other chemical firms which require going through and performing large calculations and testing probabilities.

Companies such as Morgan Stanley and large stock and banking firms will be benefited by this as they require such large-scale computational power. They will also be beneficial for medical and chemical firms as they require a computer to do chemical reaction tests and store them in a database as a human cannot remember all this information. An example of this is medicine. Firms take years to release new medicines because there is so much testing is required as they have to tell a consumer what to eat with it and without it. A quantum computer can test all the ingredients of the medicine through an entire database which is so much faster than getting a human to do this.

This is why Quantum computers are so amazing if we can make them commercially viable. They would make the world’s technology becomes infinitely more powerful. These machines could run entire database checks and correct code or manage banking. It would truly optimize the way of life in every way and make us a much more powerful and sophisticated as a race. It will automate jobs of accountants, analysts in some fields, reduce the manpower needed to fix problems and be very effective at optimization problems such as logistics and solving science and math problems.

So companies like Google are trying to simulate things like the hydrogen and helium atoms as wells as proteins and chemical structures such as glucose, and they have the capacity to make some current process much faster. When the human genome project was completed in 2003 it showed how protein could be modified to help people with certain problems in their genetic code. However, the scientist of this project realized how everyone has completely different genetic data, and to find proteins or to match characteristics of their biological code they would need to go through a large number of databases. This would help them customize certain characteristics to create the necessary proteins in order to help people.

The quantum computer, when applied in this situation, could take all of this data and be programmed to test and generate the specific proteins or “fix”  for a person to help hem with a specific health problem. This is currently being used by a large DNA company known as 23andMe which are saving hundreds of lives by making necessary proteins to prevent diseases like cancer, via the power of the quantum computers. As it can test all the specific characteristics of a person using this and see which parts of the protein will be useful coming up with the most optimal solution, which is probably going to be better than the one humans can design.

Quantum computers are also being used to design safer airplanes as they may also be used in simulating planes almost like a game but with more of a real-life situation. So unrealistic situations can be tested in case of a fire on the plane. What would be a way to treat it and instead of actually doing it? An F-15 is an incredibly fast plane and at times people lose their lives training with it. The quantum computer can not only provide a safe environment but also a real battle situation, and for commercial airlines, this simulation can provide an emergency landing procedure as current simulations with normal computers are not very sustainable for this task. This is because the code to process these scenarios would just cause the computer to glitch and generate a lot of lag during the simulations of this problem. This will also be a good way to save money for companies so they do not have to buy a training plane which ranges from 3 to 300 million dollars. If the average plane is about 100 million dollars is enough to buy 90+ quantum computers. This offers more safety to the general public and their pilots will have more comprehensive training. This would also make commercial flights cheaper as airline companies do not have to shed external costs on consumers. This is beneficial to companies that have large airliners and safety to the general public.

Another use of the quantum computer is security. To the general public companies that carry sensitive information such as banks and intelligence agencies. They can harness the superposition properties of qubits. So they can continuously change passwords to access a set of data of a particular person. If a browser like firefox purchases a quantum computer, they can use it to protect their data and other uses could also be to kill viruses and other damaging software. They can be programmed using QCl Quantum Computer Language. This is very beneficial to the public as every year nearly at least 500 million accounts of any form of social media get tampered with or unauthorized access is granted and nearly 300+ million dollars get stolen from accounts. It is predicted that we could reduce hacking by 90% if the quantum computer is used for security purposes for at least the next 20 to 30 years. Also learning the language to code quantum computer is very hard and takes a lot of training so it shall pretty much remain specialized for a few more years which reduces the chance of it being hacked.

Quantum computers offer a groundbreaking power to the human race. From protection to making scientific breakthroughs. Currently, the simulation power, speed, and security of these computers are incredible. It is predicted the quantum computer will bring us further in the next 50 years than all our discoveries in the past 100,000 years. This technology will optimize and make a lot of things more efficient.

 

Author: Raghu

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