How do we sort amazing new capabilities from eloquent marketing hype?
Headline on Facebook:
What if We Could Unlock Infinite Computing Power?
Headline when you get to the page:
What if we could unlock our computer’s maximum memory and processing power?
And that’s when you notice: “Presented by Intel”
Imagine, to begin, a computer that responds to an idea immediately: a director could re-cut her film to respond to the audience in the theater; an artist could sketch out a sculpture as it 3D prints in real-time; a writer could ideate on a notepad while personalized software turns each concept into a finely tuned sentence, written in the writer’s own voice. Now speculate even further by bringing a bit from each of these three ideas together. Picture a writer who begins the first words of her script: “Science fiction. Year 2500. We find our hero in the midst of a Martian sandstorm.” And, just like that, the picture appears on her screen: our hero, armed in a spacesuit, hides behind a rock as a red storm descends. As the idea literally takes form, the next scene comes straight to our writer’s mind.
We’re accelerating toward such a reality more quickly than it may seem. Intel® Core i7+ processors come armed with Optane memory, which intelligently caches the data necessary to perform high-level tasks, meaning the processor no longer needs to dedicate time and power to pulling that data itself. It’s a bit like having a photographic memory—it amounts to a massive boon in productivity. So it’s absolutely in the realm of possibility that a computer could one day very soon be capable of running all the processes necessary to make our writer’s dream happen, simultaneously: A computer could “remember” a writer’s voice and turn a note into a stylized sentence, use artificial intelligence to identify the elements of the sentence (its characters, setting, and action), create visual models of those elements and place them into a scene, and render and display this scene on your monitor—all in the blink of an eye.
The truth is, with this example we’re still thinking pretty small. Maximizing the memory capacity and processing power of computers could dramatically overhaul the way society gets things done. They could minimize inefficiencies in the tax code, audit a country’s infrastructure, propose a plan to rebuild the most threatened bridges, and draft contracts for architectural firms and construction companies, all in an afternoon. They could more effectively map genes and treat illness, pairing with nanobots to identify early signs of disease and a course of treatment.
So is this all marketing hype for Intel’s new chip or is it a projection of what’s to come?
Could it be a bit of both?
Is it possible. Could it be? Does hype help?
Related: Why Space? 1950s Government Educational film.
And here’s more:
World’s tiniest ‘computer’ makes a grain of rice seem massive
It could lead to big changes in health monitoring.
WT 450-767
Eternity Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Image from Pixabay.com
