The Rise of Skynet?

[joeactor]

IBM is using nanotechnology and DNA in their latest chip fabrication research:
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=2A48E7 ... B340C63FD9

... I've seen this movie before...

  :hide:  

(still, pretty cool),
JoeActor

[curiosityandthecat]

This is exciting... in fact, it's so exciting it's given me happy feet!

[PipeBox]

Meh, we'd need working AI to do anything other than really fast math on it.

Lithography, the method presently used to make processors, is beginning to reduce transistor gates to a place where quantum tunneling ruins their ability to function.  Some parts of the transistors in use today are smaller than the wavelength of ultraviolet light, and nearly none of them, up to the level of groups of transistors, are visible in red (large wavelength) light.  It's amazing what man has achieved.  45 nm, for example, which is the standard today, implies that no trace ("wire") connecting the individual bit memory transistors is more than 90 nm from any other (45 nm is the half-pitch, or half the length between the traces).  For those keeping score, we can see light down to about 390 nm, which is a very dark, vanishing violet.  The light used in lithography, at present, ranges down to 193 nm.  I could not tell you how they do it.

Sorry, that's a bit off-topic.  For what it's worth, we'll have quantum computers by the time we hit the 12 nm half-pitch, as that literally reduces the gate thickness to a mono-molecular level, or one molecule thick.  The quantum tunneling would never allow such a gate to function (although Intel claims they know how they're going to make 16 nm half-pitches, sweet Anubis), but we've already built working quantum computers, and the promise offered by superpositional computing (instead of binary, you can compute all states between 0 and 1!), we're in for a helluva show.  Transistors are going to hit a wall soon (within 20 years, assuming we don't destroy the economy and/or ourselves to the point we can no longer progress), but I'm not worried yet.  Still, none of this is AI, just hardware for it to run on, but algorithms are getting more complex all the time, and soon we may be able to use algorithms to find more algorithms.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go daydream.

[Ninteen45]

One Day I'll make a robot that makes robots that maintain the bot that makes them, Then If that works i'll make other robots to do stuff like find energy and materials.

Robots are the next phase in human evolution!!!