> Maybe computers of the future will give new meaning to the term "hive mind," with swarms of highly specialized but extremely efficient minuscule processors, able to be reconfigured and deployed depending on the task at hand.
Reminds me of a plot point in Children of Time, where literal ant colonies were repurposed in just this way.
not to be cynical, but that dream is already here. that imagery has been used to sell research projects since i was 7 years old in 1982 reading about Hans Moravec's robots in Enter magazine.
PC's were the first swarm, then laptops, then AWS, and now cell phones.
the reason this works as a daydream is it implies "highly" and "extremely" mean "more than you know now" without a specific metric. You could read articles about how the first PowerQUICC was highly efficient, then the Pentium, then the first GPU, and currently the M1.
as for "able to be recondigured and deployed," PC and phone apps cover this preetty nicely, but if that's insufficient, AWS (and co) is the latest incarnation.
as for "hive mind," this part if the daydream endures bc it polarizes the sifference between heter and honogeneous computation units. This is alluring bc of the dream of undifferentiated cells being cleverly arranged to form arbitrary functions. Yet it's quite unnecessary. Every computation is effectively formed by hierarchical structures built from NAND gates.
I thought maybe that’s what Terry Pratchett’s Hex was poking fun at, but it looks like Children of Time is quite new (2015 vs 1994 for Hex’s first appearance). I wonder what the origin of that trope is.
I haven't read Hex, but I just read Children of Time, and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) plays around with the loosely computational nature of an ant colony. Probably a few people thought about it before then, but it's getting closer to the dawn of general computation at that point
Hex is not a book but rather a recurring device in the Discworld series, mostly in later books centered on wizards - basically a technomagical computer analogue that is powered apparently by ants rather than electrons. Not sure how much did the late Pterry have the hivemind=computer analogy in mind but as an added bonus on the surface it does open up at least a few jokes about computer "bugs".
Security tangent:
Why and how is ieee.org collecting my emergency contacts and identity documents? Based on this, I chose to not accept reading this article.
>What information do we collect?
IEEE collects the following personal data in line with the use purposes explained in a subsequent section:
- Your name and contact details
- Date of birth
- Online profile data/usage
- Emergency contact information
- Social media profile information
- Copies of identification documents
The problem there is failure clearly specify what information is automatically collected vs what information is collected by way of you filling in a form, or otherwise explicitly providing them the information.
I'm quite certain that line item refers to there being a form someplace on the site where you can provide emergency contact information. I'm not an IEEE member so I'm not sure if this is just optional information you can provide on your account profile, or if it is part of signing up to attend some conference or the like.
The obvious intended purpose is that if you attend an IEEE conference (or similar event) and become stricken with a serious health issue leaving you unconscious or incoherent (and thus unable to let them know who should be contacted), they can attempt to get in touch with your emergency contacts while you are being taken to the hospital. This has benefits over the hospital having to contact your insurance company to get them to contact your emergency contacts to let them know what is going on.
Why would aliens follow standard invertebrate non invertebrate evolutionary lines? I can imagine a world where vertebrates are generally smaller and simpler creatures. What if insects had evolved efficient lungs and vertebrates had not?
Reminds me of a plot point in Children of Time, where literal ant colonies were repurposed in just this way.