Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 233 08/12/2013
I'm an adventurous cook and eater, deeply into all kinds of exotic plants, game and offal, but even so crow is something I don't care to eat much of. But eat crow I now must, at least metaphorically, because I need to admit in public that Bill Gates is the best, most serious and responsible of all the digital moguls. That was already becoming pretty obvious by his choice of occupation upon leaving the helm of Microsoft. Promoting the development of vaccines is an unglamorous and pragmatic way to really improve the lot of humanity, far removed from the flamboyant political rhetoric of so many liberal pop and movie stars. Pooling resources with Warren Buffet of Omaha rather than Hollywood or Wall Street pointed in the same direction, and he's often on the opposite side from the other Silicon Valley moguls when it comes to taxation.
But what has finally prompted me to this corvine repast is Gates's public advocacy of Canadian energy expert Vaclav Smil. A recent Wired magazine interview with Smil (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/vaclav-smil-wired/) opens by quoting Gates as saying: “There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil”. So, not trendy sci-fi authors or self-help gurus, but someone whose books better promote understanding of the most critical problems we face than anyone else I know.
To be fair to myself, though I've often been critical of Microsoft's design ideas, marketing methods and quality control, I'd never been a hater of Gates the person (unlike those commentators who paint him as a kind of Antichrist). I met him a few times in early days and could talk to tech talk to him - he's a man who's written code - and it's always been clear to me that however adept he became at building a huge business corporation, there lurked within him the heart of a true nerd. And you really need to be something of a nerd to appreciate Smil's works because he's relentlessly scientific and unromantic, interested only in trying to find out what's actually happening, in estimating actual risks rather than preaching or scaremongering.
I first encountered Smil's work in 2008 when asked to review his magisterial "Global Trends and Catastrophes: The Next Fifty Years" for The Political Quarterly (http://dickpountain-politicalquarterly.blogspot.com/2012/07/global-catastrophes-and-trends-next.html). I realised immediately that here was someone different. Smil is Professor of Environment at the University of Manitoba, but he eludes all the normal cliched labels: neither a green nor a technology booster, neither a capitalist nor an anti-capitalist, he's a *systems* man, identifying and analysing the various systems via which we strive to survive. He explains how much we know and don't know about their operation, what works and what doesn't. And he quantifies everything, especially risk (by comparing with the baseline rate of "general mortality", which for us Westerners is around 0.000001 deaths per person-exposure-hour).
I had to warn potential readers that they won't follow Smil's better arguments unless they're comfortable with log/log scale graphs, but by persevering they'd learn that death in hospital from preventable medical error is a greater risk than smoking, terrorism or car crash, and that young black citizens of Philadelphia could *reduce* their chance of death from gunshot by joining the army. He rarely offers concrete policy proposals, just more rational ways to make decisions: "There is so much we do not know, and pretending otherwise is not going to make our choices clearer or easier... we repeatedly spend enormous resources in the pursuit of uncertain (even dubious) causes and are repeatedly unprepared for real threats and unexpected events". He doesn't moralise or preach and is sceptical of those who do: he argues only from science.
In the Wired interview I mentioned above Smil argues that the demise of manufacturing in the UK and USA will doom us not only intellectually but creatively too, because innovation is tied to the process of making things. When asked whether IT jobs can replace the lost manufacturing jobs he replies somewhat scornfully "No, of course not. These are totally fungible jobs. You could hire people in Russia or Malaysia—and that’s what companies are doing." He admires Germany and Switzerland for maintaining strong manufacturing sectors and apprenticeship programs: "because you started young and learned from the older people, your products can’t be matched in quality. This is where it all starts". He points out that Apple commands such huge profit margins that it could manufacture in the USA without destroying its business model, if only it dared stand up to Wall Street: "Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad—yet everyone worships them." He doesn't say whether or not he admires Microsoft, but we know that Bill Gates certainly admires him.
Sunday 15 June 2014
A FUTURE RE-IMAGINED
Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 232 06/11/2013
Once upon a time, in the '80s and early '90s, I used to write highly technical columns about future computer technologies, both hardware and software - stuff like asynchronous or transport-triggered processor architectures, object-oriented memory managers, parallel processing algorithms and much more. I don't do that stuff much nowadays, but the reason is not that my interest has waned but rather that the total triumph of Intel and Microsoft condemned many of those esoteric research avenues to become dead ends. And my aging brain rebels when asked to study the detailed cache architecture of Intel's next CPU generation. That doesn't mean I've lost interest entirely, merely that I can now afford to wait for breakthroughs that might just change the whole game, which don't happen very often (and don't always deliver). Over the last 10 years I've covered just three such technologies, namely spintronics, diamond-film quantum dots and graphenes. It still gives me a bit of a thrill when a new one arrives, as it just has with the "memristor".
If you've heard of the concept it will almost certainly be thanks to Hewlett Packard's occasional announcements that it's working on memristor-based storage devices, and hopes to have 100Terabyte drives available in around five years. But memristors, if they can be made to work economically - which is not yet certain - promise more than storage. If they are able to function like transistors too they could render possible the first wholly-integrated computer architectures in which CPU, local memory and mass storage are all built from very similar basic units.
So what exactly is a memristor? As its name suggests, it's an electronic component that combines the attributes of a resistor and a memory. What that means in HP's application is a kind of resistive RAM, in which the memory cells are resistors that retain a memory of the current that last flowed through them. Pass a current through the cell one way and its resistance increases, pass a current the opposite way and resistance decreases, but crucially the cell *preserves its last state* and so acts as a non-volatile memory. You can read 0s and 1s by measuring the resistance of cells. HP's memristor cells are implemented by two sets of parallel wires, one platinum and one titanium, at right angles and separated by twin layers of titanium dioxide. One layer is pure oxide and a good insulator, while the other is lightly doped to deplete it of some oxygen atoms. Where they cross a current passed through the junction causes oxygen "holes" to migrate into the undoped layer, reducing the resistance of both layers: when the current is reversed they migrate back again. Two things to note about this scheme: the substrate doesn't need to be silicon, and the cells are so simple they can be made very small indeed, giving huge packing densities.
HP hopes to make 3nm memristors that switch in a nanosecond, as fast as DRAM and denser than flash memory, which they could replace. All very good, but the memristor concept goes deeper. The Chinese-American non-linear circuit theorist Leon O. Chua has suggested that the memristor is an expected fourth fundamental electronic device - the better-known ones being the resistor, capacitor and inductor - that links magnetic flux to electric charge. It should be able to do more than just make memory cells. Other researchers have shown that memristors can be made using different physical effects, like magnetic spin or polarisation, and from different materials like organic polymers. It's also been suggested that memristor cells can be combined into "crossbar latches", a novel kind of logic gate that can function like a transistor in a processor architecture. Most suggestive of all is that memristors remember in a way similar to the reinforcement of synaptic connections in the animal brain, and there are teams working on using them in neural learning networks.
Bundling all such speculations together sets my imagination running riot. Throw in a few other leading-edge technologies like graphenes with their miraculous conductivity and photosensitivity, micropipelines for asynchronous operation, and analog resistive networks as used by Carver Mead for his chip that emulates the human retina. Now imagine future flexible plastic materials that can collect solar power and store it in their own integral hypercapacitors, that contain petabytes of memory integrated with distributed processing elements, that can see using grids of nano-lenses that mimic the insect compound eye, can move using grids of nano-actuators and can learn using integrated neural networks. Sci-fi authors have forseen such materials in their imagined futures for many, many years, and though we may be nowhere near achieving them, we're beginning to see dimly where the route might start. Perhaps memristors are a crucial step onto that route.
Once upon a time, in the '80s and early '90s, I used to write highly technical columns about future computer technologies, both hardware and software - stuff like asynchronous or transport-triggered processor architectures, object-oriented memory managers, parallel processing algorithms and much more. I don't do that stuff much nowadays, but the reason is not that my interest has waned but rather that the total triumph of Intel and Microsoft condemned many of those esoteric research avenues to become dead ends. And my aging brain rebels when asked to study the detailed cache architecture of Intel's next CPU generation. That doesn't mean I've lost interest entirely, merely that I can now afford to wait for breakthroughs that might just change the whole game, which don't happen very often (and don't always deliver). Over the last 10 years I've covered just three such technologies, namely spintronics, diamond-film quantum dots and graphenes. It still gives me a bit of a thrill when a new one arrives, as it just has with the "memristor".
If you've heard of the concept it will almost certainly be thanks to Hewlett Packard's occasional announcements that it's working on memristor-based storage devices, and hopes to have 100Terabyte drives available in around five years. But memristors, if they can be made to work economically - which is not yet certain - promise more than storage. If they are able to function like transistors too they could render possible the first wholly-integrated computer architectures in which CPU, local memory and mass storage are all built from very similar basic units.
So what exactly is a memristor? As its name suggests, it's an electronic component that combines the attributes of a resistor and a memory. What that means in HP's application is a kind of resistive RAM, in which the memory cells are resistors that retain a memory of the current that last flowed through them. Pass a current through the cell one way and its resistance increases, pass a current the opposite way and resistance decreases, but crucially the cell *preserves its last state* and so acts as a non-volatile memory. You can read 0s and 1s by measuring the resistance of cells. HP's memristor cells are implemented by two sets of parallel wires, one platinum and one titanium, at right angles and separated by twin layers of titanium dioxide. One layer is pure oxide and a good insulator, while the other is lightly doped to deplete it of some oxygen atoms. Where they cross a current passed through the junction causes oxygen "holes" to migrate into the undoped layer, reducing the resistance of both layers: when the current is reversed they migrate back again. Two things to note about this scheme: the substrate doesn't need to be silicon, and the cells are so simple they can be made very small indeed, giving huge packing densities.
HP hopes to make 3nm memristors that switch in a nanosecond, as fast as DRAM and denser than flash memory, which they could replace. All very good, but the memristor concept goes deeper. The Chinese-American non-linear circuit theorist Leon O. Chua has suggested that the memristor is an expected fourth fundamental electronic device - the better-known ones being the resistor, capacitor and inductor - that links magnetic flux to electric charge. It should be able to do more than just make memory cells. Other researchers have shown that memristors can be made using different physical effects, like magnetic spin or polarisation, and from different materials like organic polymers. It's also been suggested that memristor cells can be combined into "crossbar latches", a novel kind of logic gate that can function like a transistor in a processor architecture. Most suggestive of all is that memristors remember in a way similar to the reinforcement of synaptic connections in the animal brain, and there are teams working on using them in neural learning networks.
Bundling all such speculations together sets my imagination running riot. Throw in a few other leading-edge technologies like graphenes with their miraculous conductivity and photosensitivity, micropipelines for asynchronous operation, and analog resistive networks as used by Carver Mead for his chip that emulates the human retina. Now imagine future flexible plastic materials that can collect solar power and store it in their own integral hypercapacitors, that contain petabytes of memory integrated with distributed processing elements, that can see using grids of nano-lenses that mimic the insect compound eye, can move using grids of nano-actuators and can learn using integrated neural networks. Sci-fi authors have forseen such materials in their imagined futures for many, many years, and though we may be nowhere near achieving them, we're beginning to see dimly where the route might start. Perhaps memristors are a crucial step onto that route.
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