A Machine to Think for US
When I was nine or ten years old, Dad and I would watch reruns of the television show Star Trek. Back then, I would have never imagined that so much of the “technology” in the program would become a reality. Talking, thinking, responsive computers and tiny personal communication devices, for example, just seemed like science fiction. Now they are not only a reality, but they are an indispensable part of everyday life. I can hardly imagine the developments in technology that my children will experience.
Thinking of the future and trends in technology, at this time I believe there is almost no limit to what humans are capable of creating. Technology developments happen faster and faster each day. This is especially true for computers, both personal and business and industry based models. My first computer was Commodore 64 and it was a neat thing to have but it didn’t do much. After I joined the Navy, I worked with an aircraft guidance radar system that was powered by a UNIVAC computer. In fact the Navy somehow kept that system running well past the year 2000. Now, we have progressed well past these dinosaurs. Computer developments are the wave of the future, and development in that respect will shape events worldwide.
Moore’s Law, formulated in 1965, predicts that the number of components in an integrated circuit chip will double every 18 months (Shahan, 2013). Considering the power of computers today, if Moore’s Law continues to hold true, the developments in computing power will produce computers that are exponentially more powerful than today’s computers (Moore’s Law, n.d.). Considering this, I believe that in the future, computers will become thinking machines that have at least some ability to reason and compute as fast if not faster than the human brain.
IBM is already made significant progress toward creating a computer that can not only access most if not all human knowledge via the Web, but it can figure out what...