by Pedro Pacheco

Created on: April 06, 2009

In the near future I bet that artificial intelligence will be the fastest improving and sales growing computer field.

The computer was invented to replace men in the intellectual tasks, just like the steam engine replaced men in the physical labor.

Only one thing keeps the computer from making us completely obsolete is their lack of skills to be automated in the process of decision making. The computer is only good in limited intellectual tasks but if you put is making some serious work where it's analytical skills are not enough, he will not be able to do it. Humans have always evolved since the beginning of the times, but the computer will only go as far as we make it go. The real computer is the one that can make a new better and faster computer.

Did you know that in Japan in Tokyo the trains are fully automatic with no man driving them, with no man in the station to look after things! There is only one class of people in the station which are the ones that have to clean it and to make some maintenance, aside that the trains there are completely automatic. When a line is damaged it's repaired by a special doctor train with no people involved on it.

The 4G network is one that can make the network all by itself. Imagine if your company's computers could make all their connections by themselves with no user intervention. Wouldn't that be amazing? I am sure you would love it.

You see, the more time elapses, the more intelligent software becomes but it's still not enough to have software fast enough. Software itself must have monstrous amounts of data to be able to learn something from it and the hardware itself must be able to change with the software else the hardware will soon become obsolete. The ultimate hardware will be the one that is flexible that can be changed with the software as well, like the liquid metal science fiction.

The processor companies are on their well way to make better processors but if they maintain the current pace it will take too long before they finally do something really great. In ten years the computer hardware has not changed that much has it?

Finally let me just tell you that no matter how fast the computer becomes it will never be any better if the right programming language is not found. Just like a brain that cannot communicate with the body, a great computer without great software will not go very far...

Let's just stay around and see what happens.

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