Tomorrow will see how quantum computing serves for the world's needs

Current computers will soon give way to devices capable of thinking that is as advanced as that of the human brain following rational agent and cognitive agent and learning approaches.

The third age of machines is near. Quantum and cognitive computers will perform really Big Data processing in cloud. They will be capable of sensemaking. This age follows that of data science, a multidisciplinary science for collecting, processing and enhancing Big Data.

Data science is like mining for gold nuggets, for the digital world, refining crude Big Data into useful, predictive information. This is done for making sense out of the gathered data. Currently we use this to know in advance the product a customer will choose. As you know it from Amazon’s recommendations.  To achieve such a feat, data science uses algorithms, and quite extraordinary machine learning can improve these algorithms over time.

The current computing model is unsustainable. These algorithms need immense computing power because there is an inherent complexity in perception of the world – even a coarse perception of a view hundred features, only. This forced industry such as Google or Amazon developing parallel computing systems. Nevertheless, current equipment is not ideal - a machine is sequential and does not know how to comprehend thousands of pieces of information at once.

To tackle more sophisticated sensemaking, e.g. understanding the complex interaction of matter or the sound perception of some environment, we need some kind of super human brain, which has an average of hundreds of billion neurons with many thousand connections each. We can wait as microprocessors improve - after all, Moore's Law states that they double their capacity regularly through miniaturization. But we are still far from electronic transistors being as small as a few atoms. And at this scale quantum effects appear.

The solution is to base the treatment of information on a quantum state of small electronic components. In a quantum system a particle can be in superposition, i.e. in two places at one time and an action on one particle can automatically alter another.

In the present state of research, industry class quantum computers struggle because any unfortunate interaction with their environment changes their internal states changing the computation into random result.

The vision is to have only a few quantum computers, designed to interact with conventional computers for combined optimization problems. This needs to be a collaborative endeavor. Which is the reason for this post.

From publications we know that such a computer was already built by the D-Wave, and Google and NASA experiment to apply it for machine learning applications.

Other companies are also getting into the development of super-intelligent machines that are inspired not by quantum physics but by cognitive neuroscience. Their chips have a plasticity, that is to say they have the ability to adapt and understand. Inspired by the human brain, will equip all connected objects eventually to make them more intelligent in their interaction with data and users.

I see that there will be the stage of 'neuromorphic' machines. These two revolutions, of quantum and cognitive computing, will begin with very bulky and expensive machines. I believe they will be made available as a kind of cloud service, to allow consumption of their computing capacity enabling applications you are not yet capable of dreaming of.