Computers

If there is one remarkable technological development throughout my lifetime it is computers. This development is stunning on 2 fronts :

The increase in speed and capacity has been mind boggling, from kilobytes, to Megabytes, to Gigabytes, and now Terabytes. Each step is a factor of 1000. Processor speeds up from less than a MHz to several GHz, and multiple processors on a chip.
From being huge devices needing their own computing room, they are now tiny and everywhere – your fitbit, your phone, your car, your wifi, your TV.

As I write this we are seeing AI as the latest fashion. This is the first type of computer which learns from material and then produces output from new input without us knowing exactly the relationship between the two. Right now it can produce art, vocalise text in someone’s voice, modify images, produce or modify video, and create fairly convincing text on different topics (convincing but untrue as some lawyers have found recently). It is very hard to know where this will go. It could undermine confidence in all forms of news, and so undermine democracy. It could undermine evidence used in courts and so impact justice. It could lead to self-drive cars which have an unpredictable streak (just like real drivers), and as the technology evolves it might just be possible to make a truly sentient intelligence.

I get on with computers – discovered that at Uni. Where computers met science there was a lot of scope for better data handling, and I am proud to have been the originator of a data exchange format between different types of surface analytical machines which was taken on by the National Physical Laboratory and has become an international standard.