Brisbourne is writing a series of articles on Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. This one deals with Kurzweil's projects of the future of the personal computer. Kurzweil’s prediction is that by 2025 personal computers (perhaps costing less than $1,000 in today’s money) will have the power of the human brain:
personal computers, or at least those back in 2005 when The Singularity was published provided 10(exp 9) cps and an extrapolation historical increases in computing power going forward yields the prediction that personal computers will have a capacity of 10(exp 16) cps by 2025.The question is, what will we do with a personal computer that is 10000000 times faster than that on which I am typing this? Of course, I can imagine (easily) that the average user of personal computers will be a few orders of magnitude smarter and faster than I am. I can also imagine that software developers will continue to create packages that provide small advances in features to the consumer but require a lot more computer to run. Still, one hopes that there will be new killer apps that utilize the stunning computer power to come to do something new and really useful! I hope some really bright guys, maybe in MIT or Stanford or maybe the Indian Institute of Technology are working on those apps right now!
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