Jones sez:
Apologies for once again regressing into a favorite speculative subject which has only passing relevance to alternative energy - the rapidly approaching advent of AI (artificial intelligence).
You are forgiven, my son.
Actually the relevance might become important, but anyway... IMHO this eventual outcome of ongoing trends - progressing towards machine-intelligence (artificial or not) will arrive 'sooner rather than later' - and take many observers by surprise, because first of all, computers are still at a rather low capability state, as of now ...
A company to keep tabs of is Star Bridge Systems. I think SBS may have been mentioned a few times in the past in Vortex. Their hardware involves futuristic designs, FPGA, Field Programmable Gate Array technology, which I gather is still considered decades or more off in the future. But SBS claims their reconfigurable technology is now available. They claim their products contain the equivalent power of colossal supercomputer number crunching computers that sit on a table tops, powered by a typical wall socket. NASA and DOD have purchased systems for evaluation. See: http://starbridgesystems.com/ It would have been nice to have taken advantage of SBS's technology such as when running Finite Element Method Magnetic's software simulations. A typical simulation can take hours or days to complete. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com
