Thursday, April 12, 2012

Future Computers

Steve Mills is Senior Vice President and Group Executive - Software & Systems at IBM. He had some views about the future of computing that he shared in an article at CNN/Money yesterday, April 11, 2012.

Computers may be able to think eventually

They will become more and more closely involved in our daily lives

They will continue to increase the speed and efficiency of our work

But in Information Technology, they have a long way to go because, at present:
  • Over 70% of IT budgets are spent on operations and maintenance
  • 55% of IT professionals experience downtime, which can take anywhere between minutes to over a week to fix
  • It can take up to four to six months just to establish hardware and software infrastructure
  • Nearly two-thirds of organizations fall behind schedule when deploying new IT capabilities
Summarized from:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/11/computings-next-milestone-is-thinking/

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Blog Author Comments
There is, in my view, an unstoppable trend toward self-programming. For example, who needs a programmer when a data base can be entered into Access and, through some screens and selections lasting no longer than a question session with a programmer, the screens can be developed so that, much like a video game, the desired program is written automatically in SQL language. This quasi-programming is faster, cheaper and less prone to error than re-inventing the wheel whenever data reporting needs change or mature.

The same accomplishment at a higher level is available through quasi-programming a cube of data, an area pioneered by Hyperion Essbase (now part of Oracle).

Artificial intelligence may require at least two breakthroughs:

a.  A revolutionary improvement in search engine programming, along the lines of Wolfram Alpha (see http://www.wolframalpha.com/ described at http://www.wolframalpha.com/about.html ) but even more advanced than these advanced algorithms of Stephen Wolfram


b.  A new computer essential architecture which, like the human brain, requires no "central processing unit" as devised by von Neumann circa 1947 and used in nearly all modern computers for the past 65 years

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