Singularity Signposts – 30dec2008

George Rebane

Cold computing as envisioned by several physicists (e.g. Frank Tipler) and computer scientists (e.g. Hans Moravec), and predicted by futurists (e.g Ray Kurzweil) is a step closer as reported in ‘How Small Can Computers Get? Computing In A Molecule’.  A team of French scientists (please hold applause and/or snide remarks) at the French National Scientific Research Center has made progress toward atomic scale computing.

What’s so big about this?  Well, just about everything.  In Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near he addresses the question ‘How Smart is a Rock?’ and provides an answer that will startle you (more than the spelling of ‘Einstein’ in the picture).  It turns out that plain old cold matter has a tremendous potential to store data and compute using its original molecular structure somewhat rearranged and repurposed.  And computational power in small spaces that requires a small amount or even no additional amount of energy will make possible beings, experiences, and even universes that today are already more than glimmers of our imaginations.

From the article we learn that –

In a conventional microprocessor – the “motor” of a modern computer – transistors are the essential building blocks of digital circuits, creating logic gates that process true or false signals. A few transistors are needed to create a single logic gate and modern microprocessors contain billions of them, each measuring around 100 nanometres.

Transistors have continued to shrink in size since Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore famously predicted in 1965 that the number that can be placed on a processor would double roughly every two years. But there will inevitably come a time when the laws of quantum physics prevent any further shrinkage using conventional methods. That is where atomic-scale computing comes into play with a fundamentally different approach to the problem.

Today big server farms operated worldwide by companies like Microsoft and Google consume immense amounts of energy and space.  The limits to growth with current technologies are staring us in the face.  But, as before, when we approach such limits, human creativity jumps in and a new paradigm emerges that gives us more running room.

“The question we have asked ourselves is how many atoms does it take to build a computer?” Joachim (project team leader) says. “That is something we cannot answer at present, but we are getting a better idea about it.”

The team has managed to design a simple logic gate with 30 atoms that perform the same task as 14 transistors, while also exploring the architecture, technology and chemistry needed to achieve computing inside a single molecule and to interconnect molecules.

The human brain can be viewed as an enormously powerful computer the performance of which we cannot hope to match with current approaches to computing.  But reducing things down to the molecular level is the domain in which our brains operate.  And now we are beginning to take concrete steps toward, yes, a concrete computer.  When the first molecular computer executes a simple program, I wonder if there will be anyone to say ‘A small step for mankind, a giant leap toward Singularity.’ or something like that.

There are indications that we are already living in a computing universe.  A post-Singularity civilization using atomic level cold computing will be able to create new universes in which our descendants may even choose to live.  But more on that another time.

 

Comments

[Russ]

George,
Just some thoughts that popped into my head while reading the above. Once molecular computers are developed, will everything we own become a smart device? Who will decide how smart? Who will control the on/off switch for all this smart stuff. Every computer I have ever used required a software program to function. When will the smart rocks become smart enough to write their own programs to determine how smart they need to be. Will they stop at need and move to desire? The power cords and batteries in our smart devices are powerful unforgiving tethers. No power, no computing. No brain food, no computation. How do we break the smart rocks tether? Can we power smart rocks from the cosmic energy bombarding the earth daily, eliminating the tether?

[George Rebane]

Good questions Russ. Low-powered molecular scale computing will most likely come to pass before the Singularity. Such computers will be assembled by nano-scaled engines and will exhibit the regular structures that we’re used to seeing in micro-chips today. In other words, microscopic examination of these computers will immediately reveal the hand of Man in their construction. Most of these computers will probably operate with written code like those of today. But some of the molecular scale machines will be of the form of learning structures, perhaps similar to the hierarchical temporal memory proposed by Jeff Hawkins in ‘On Intelligence’, and they will, in a sense, program themselves by going through a learning/training experience. (Numenta, Inc. is now developing such computers for commercial applications.)

It’s hard to imagine that cold matter computing would arrive pre-Singularity. Cold computing implies that all kinds of matter could become ‘smart’ by establishing a computing mesh within itself through an organization of either atomic-scale electromagnetic or quantum ‘connections’. Microscopic examination of the innards of such computing matter would not reveal any manmade regularity. But, of course, the matter could then learn to be smart in some sense. It would draw energy from its environment and be able to compute (think?) at speeds that increase with its energy content (e.g. as measured by its temperature). And if by chance cold matter computing does arrive before the Singularity, I believe that the Singularity event would occur quickly thereafter.

Finally, when we consider computing at this level, biology will have been transcended and we have to re-examine our concepts of sentience, sapience, and life itself. Consider this, every star in the universe could be ‘alive’ since every star has the potential complexity to establish a computing mesh within itself. But now we’re getting to a level of ruminating that requires at least a glass of wine and a comfortable chair for each participant.