NASA NTRS2020
Developments in technology over the recent decades have been extraordinary. They include the IT, bio, nano, and now quantum and energetics technology arenas and their many combinatorial interactions and impacts. In the main, these are at the frontiers of the small and in a combinational, synergistic feeding frenzy with each other. They fall under the broad category of Disruptive Technologies and have greatly altered society. The outlook for the runout of these and other technology developments augers mid-term to later alterations in components of the human existence theorem, including the requirement to work for our living and our physiological makeup and longevity (Ref 1). The IT revolution began in the 1950s with the development of solid-state electronics. The biologics revolution began later in the 1960s and 1970s with DNA and genomics, and the nano revolution in the 1990s with self-forming nano systems and carbon nanotubes. Quantum technology is now developing rapidly, aided by enabling nano systems, and the energetics revolution is providing ever more efficient and less expensive renewable energy sources. The IT revolution has produced improvements of an astounding eleven orders of magnitude in computing speed since the late 1950s. As we shift from silicon to biological, optical, nano, molecular, and atomic computing, improvements of some 4 orders of magnitude are evidently possible from either optical or DNA computing [Refs 2and 3], then there are combinatorials. Then there is quantum computing, under development worldwide for an increasing number of applications and proffering phenomenal capabilities. The current fastest computers are considerably beyond human brain speed. Machine intelligence is developing well after decades of inadequate machine capability, now no longer the case, and a detour into expert systems. Researchers in machine intelligence are now pursuing deep learning approaches using neural nets, which are proving to be extremely useful. Some believe the frontier of potential human-level machine intelligence may be found in biomimetics and brain-emulation approaches. There is even a possibility of “emergence”—i.e., when the machine intelligence is complex enough that it “wakes up,” as when human intelligence emerged via evolution during the million-plus years of the hunter-gatherer epoch [ Ref 4]. In fact, some posit that human intelligence can be improved upon and is only a cul-de-sac of what is conceivable. The IT revolution has produced massive changes in human society and economics—from the Internet, enabling the rapid expansion of knowledgeability (and even what is knowable), to an increasingly pervasive trend of “tele-everything.” The extraordinary compilation, storage, and availability of truly massive amounts of information could, when combined with AI and under the mantra of “big data,” greatly improve many of our technical and commercial processes and their content including elucidating new heuristic governing laws.