Computing Systems
Lecture 12
Future Computing
Past Trends in Computing
• Moore’s Law
– Integrated circuits double in transistor counts (and
approximate power) roughly every 18 months
• See paper online
• Towards Ubiquitous Computing
– From one computer per organisation to
computers everywhere
• Computers increasingly personal
– From business tools to personal computers to
persistent companions
Breaking the Physical Limits I
• Associated with Moore’s Law is an increase in
the amount of power consumption of ICs
– For many devices power dissipation (i.e. Heat) and
consumption is a bigger problem than achieving
very high compute power
– A mobile phone that lasts ten minutes on battery
and burns your hand isn’t very useful
– Multi-core solutions break down computing tasks
to multiple low power processor cores
• Rapidly advancing area of computing
Breaking the Physical Limits II
• Quantum Computing
– Using individual atoms and photons for data
storage and computation
– Developing potentially unbreakable cryptography
– Breaking speed limits of traditional digital
computers
• Current quantum computers very limited and
require very large labs for operation
– 20 or 50 years from now?
Historical Trends: Media
• To consider how computer use may change in
future, we can look more broadly at how
technology has changed how we relate to e.g.
media over a longer time period
– Music
– Film/Television
A musical analogy
Listening to music over 100 years ago...
Budapest Orchestra, Lyricmac, CC-BY-SA, http://bit.ly/wn4vwjpg4
Listening to music around 100 years ago...
Phonograph, Norman Bruderhofer,
www.cylinder.de http://bit.ly/wn4vwjpg3
CC-BY-SA
Listening to music around 30 years ago...
Walkman, © Esa Sorjonen,
http://bit.ly/wn4vwjpg2
Listening to music in last 10 years ago...
MP3 Player, Locketudor, http://bit.ly/wn4vwjpg1 CC-BY-SA
Today...
Young woman with red hair, Jean-Pierre Bazard,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeune_fille_%C3%A0_la_chevelure_rouge_%281%29.JPG
CC-BY-SA
Theatre, Film and Television
From theatre
...to Cinema
...to Television
...to Home Video
...to YouTube/iPlayer
Currently there is a generation of children
growing up not knowing about having to
watch what is on TV ‘now’
Where we are now…
• Mobile phones now have power comparable
to desktops of less than a decade ago
– Rich media & 3D capabilities with integrated still
and video cameras
– Mobile broadband internet & local wireless
connectivity
• What happens when all of this is combined?
• What will happen when this becomes
commonplace?
Pranav Mistry
SixthSense
Light Touch
Interactive Projector
Augmented Reality Apps
Google Goggles
• Camera powered search engine
• Can recognise e.g. Book covers, paintings,
read barcodes, recognise some landmarks, etc
Siri
• Voice interface for iPhone
• Voice interfaces also available for PC (e.g.
Dragon Dictate) with limited take up, and XBox
360 (somewhat more successful), and other
devices
• Still have issues with regional accents!
– Hence delayed launch of Siri in UK
• Will voice input become the norm?
Sony HMZ-T1
• Available now (Japan)
Google Project Glass
• Not available now!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4
Digital Tattoos
• Patented, coming soon???
Always On
• Many people today are already always
connected, always ‘on’
– Always communicating
• These developing technologies show that we
are likely to be more deeply and more
persistently connected in years to come
– Will we be able to switch off?
– How do we balance being somewhere and
connecting with other people online?
Alone Together
Further Reading
• Halting State by Charles Stross
• Alone Together by Sherry Turkle
• Wikipedia:
– SixthSense, Augmented Reality, Quantum
Computing
• Quantum Computing tutorials:
– http://www.qubit.org/tutorials.html