Robotic Nation Evidence

EMC launches first petabyte array

From the article:

EMC beat its rivals to the winning post on Thursday when it became the first company to launch a storage array that will hold a full petabyte of data — easily the largest array that EMC manufactures.

The announcement of the massive nine-cabinet Symmetrix DMX-3 was part of a swathe of announcements that EMC made in London on Thursday...

The Symmetrix DMX-3 is the company's new standard array that runs from the low-end — at least low by EMC's standards — to the high-end petabyte system. They all feature a new 500GB drive which means that 2,400 drives must be assembled to get to a petabyte of total capacity.

What's funny is that in 2025 or 2030, your iPod will have a petabyte of disk space...

St Lawrence of Google

The article is a fairly typical review of a Google speech until we get to the last paragraph:

If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Messrs Page and Brin have in common. It's “in their DNA,” says Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist famous for investing early in both Yahoo! and Google. Whereas Yahoo! was started by two Stanford students who turned a hobby into a business, Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest, says Mr Moritz. And what is that quest? Merely upstaging Microsoft would be almost banal. “We're not trying to build a better operating system,” says Mr Schmidt (although that will not kill the rumour). Part of the plan is certainly “organising the world's information”. But some people think they detect an even more grandiose design. Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, “they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test”—in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.

At that point, what happens? If you have the money and know-how to create "an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm", what happens next?

Something to start off the new year:

BIG BROTHER IS REAL THIS TIME

From the article:

What will the war on terrorism produce at home? The answer to that question seems to be unfolding in Judt's home country, Great Britain, and in the United States, where he teaches at New York University: The great English-speaking democracies are almost inevitably remaking themselves as police states. Changing or ignoring the laws of liberty and instituting more and more invasive technological monitoring of citizens are the new passions of the interventionary state -- all in the name of spreading freedom.

While the U.S. government, supported by majorities in national polls, is ignoring laws on oversight of homeland spying, the British are developing systems to literally follow, photographically, every citizen on his or her daily rounds. Big Brother, the fictional invention of a British writer, George Orwell, will be real and functional within a year. The first step, scheduled to be operational next March, will use thousands of cameras linked to government databases to photograph every vehicle entering or leaving London, driving on major highways or stopping for gasoline -- and checking those movements against driver's licenses and other government information over two- and five-year periods.

"The new national surveillance network for tracking car journeys," said Steve Conner, science editor of The Independent, "... is already working on ways of automatically recognizing human faces by computer ... every move recorded and stored by machines." Police also project a need for more complicated surveillance systems, schemes aided by hidden computer chips in new cars and trucks.

See Robotic Nation for details.

The next step in the development of microprocessors is the roll-out of the 65nm manufacturing process, which appears to be successful:

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 & 975X Express Chipset: 65nm is Here

There is a fascinating graph in the article showing the trendline from 0.8um in 1990 to 0.65nm today. Obviously we will reach a "minimum feature size" for silicon at some point, so it will be fascinating to see what the next step is for Intel when we reach that point. But we still have a ways to go.

It is also interesting that power consumption is down rather than up in these new chips.

When I do public speaking on these topics, a comment I hear almost every time is, "well, your Robot predictions will not come true because computers are not going to get much faster than they are today. Moore's law is dead." It is not clear to me where this thinking comes from. Moore's law has been in place for perhaps 60 years. We have moved from relays to vacuum tubes to transistors to chips in that time. Something else will come along when silicon reaches its natural limits (carbon nanotubes, quantum computing or something). Or we will figure out a way to do 3-D silicon. Or we will come up with a new computing paradigm that does not depend on every single transistor and wire working. The human brain has billions of cells and uses only 20 watts or so, so we have a working technology right there as an example of how far things can go.

Even more interesting is the algorithm and programming side. The new Xbox 360 has 6 cores, but most games use only one of them because we haven't yet figured out how to write highly multi-threaded game code. We still don't have a good general approach to computer vision. As soon as we do, we will see vision cards proliferate just as we have with graphics cards. Once we figure these things out, it may change the course of hardware design.