Hello everyone. Long time lurker here. I felt compelled to contribute a little here as the subject is something I contemplate constantly and have
frequent conversations about with family and friends ( I know, not always the best way to bounce ideas due to potential biased, but I am always
willing to accept being wrong about something with enough evidence.) I have no real background in coding although I'm very interested in learning, so
please bear with me on this. Over the span of my relatively short life, I have seen astounding things be achieved due to the advent of the internet as
I'm sure many of you have. One good example is the ability to find almost any "how to" video in order to fix a problem that used to require someone
with special knowledge to fix, ie. a mechanic, IT personnel, etc. There is still a current demand for other people to take care of these issues due to
man's innate laziness. We really do like to have things automated for us, hence our creation of technology.
On to the point. I was born in '86, so I'm on the very cusp of the "millennial" generation. Due to this availability of resources that I grew up
with, I can't even imagine what life was like before computers. Now jump to the next generation coming into this world. By the time they are my age
they will have seen and developed with the introduction of Internet of Things (IoT or Internet 2.0). In a short span of 20 years, we have gone from
Deep Blue and Kasparov played each other on two occasions. The first match began on February 10, 1996, in which Deep Blue became the first machine
to win a chess game against a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the
following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2 (wins count 1 point, draws count ½ point). The match concluded on February 17, 1996. Deep
Blue was then heavily upgraded (unofficially nicknamed "Deeper Blue")[11] and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch
3½–2½, ending on May 11. Deep Blue won the deciding game six after Kasparov made a mistake in the opening, becoming the first computer system to
defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls. The system derived its playing strength mainly from brute
force computing power. It was a massively parallel, RS/6000 SP Thin P2SC-based system with 30 nodes, with each node containing a 120 MHz P2SC
microprocessor, enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. Its chess playing program was written in C and ran under the AIX operating system.
It was capable of evaluating 200 million positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 version. In June 1997, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful
supercomputer according to the TOP500 list, achieving 11.38 GFLOPS on the High-Performance LINPACK benchmark.
to:
Throughout the competition, Libratus recruited the raw power of approximately 600 of Bridges’ 846 compute nodes. Bridges total speed is 1.35
petaflops, about 7,250 times as fast as a high-end laptop and its memory is 274 Terabytes, about 17,500 as much as you’d get in that laptop. This
computing power gave Libratus the ability to play four of the best Texas Hold’em players in the world at once and beat them.
That's an increase of roughly 118,600 times in computing power utilized by AI compared to just 20 years ago. Granted this is a shallow estimate
as the architecture, programming and other variables not included in the assessment were not accounted for in the calculation.
Moving on to the increase in population and the increase of internet access to said population. The population of the world in '86 was about 4.9
billion, today it sits at roughly 7.3 billion. A 48% increase in 30 years. I'll take 2030 as that was the last date i saw mentioned before posting
this. In 2030 the U.N. projects the world population to be 8.5 billion. Another 16% increase from today. Now take the population of the world using
the internet in 1995 ( it's as far back as I could find with a basic search). It was about 16 million, or 0.4% of the 1995 population. As of Dec 2016
it sat at 3.675 billion, or roughly 50.1% of the world population. this increase in Internet availability is already having major impacts on
technology and the speed at which information is shared around the world.
Now imagine for a second that our internet saturation levels reach 65% by 2030. That would mean that you would have a potential 5.5 billion
people all with access to each other, sharing breakthroughs, from the backyard/basement scientist to fully funded labs. Now most companies keep
private some of these breakthroughs, but it is becoming increasingly popular for collaboration to cross country lines leading to more and more open
research. Also with the increase in translation software the language barrier gets thinner and thinner, making it even easier to share this info.
Introduce IoT and you have so much data available that it becomes increasingly easier to define "human". Everything from foods eaten to biomedical
readings will begin to give us a bigger picture of how we work both mentally and physically. This in turn will allow us to create better algorithms
that mimic human intelligence. Each generation tends to get smarter due to genetic variables and education aka sharing of information. The
"millennials" already see what happens when technology begins to take off. Hence the mass nostalgia for something from just 10-20 years ago when life
was "simpler". That's not a very long time for an entire generation to feel like they are being left behind. Now I hate generalizations, so to make it
clear, my reference to "millennials" does not encompass all in that generation. It is a generalization to help with a perspective, not to label.
Onto the next gen coming into play here. By 2030, those born in 2005 will be 25, and those who went to college straight out of high school will
have graduated and started to influence the world, if they don't do so at a younger age with access to resources such as YouTube. This generation is
going to be smarter and have had access to a world of information at their finger tips essentially from birth. The internet is now part of their
world. It's vital to realize that their brains, when in it's most malleable plasticity, is being trained to use the internet as second nature. That
means this generation is going to be more adept with programming purely due to the nature of humans to adapt to and control our environment. In their
case the Internet and IoT will be a vital part of their environment.
Due to all of these variables converging, and the fact that this adaptability to the internet is already taking place within just the "millennial"
generation, let alone future gens. I see human level intelligence being possible by 2030. This isn't including all of the physics breaks through that
are happening at an ever increasing rate, or the advances in material sciences as well as quantum, photonic, DNA computing, or even memristors. As i
am lazy I think I'll end it here haha. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I'm going to slide back into my comfy hole now. Enjoy