The Future of Flops

My son occasionally gets really excited about how the technology of the future is going to be so "dank".  I agree, it will.  Today, he was focusing on video cards, which then led him to look at supercomputing stats and expectations.  He kept repeating, "A billion billion calculations per second.  That's insane!"  And it is.  Insane.

As of now, many people involved in high performance computing believe that we will reach the exaflop level in 2020 (or there about).  We have some ways to go, given the current peak speed of only ~ 33 petaflops.  That said, there is a planned computer at Oak Ridge that could reach 300 petaflops.  From there, it's only a factor of three.  And desktop computers have been running only about 10 to 15 years behind the super computers (though that pace may not continue).  It all goes well, in my lifetime, we could end up with an exaflop's worth of power on our desktop.

There is a great Wikipedia article on Exascale Computing, which I won't attempt to improve on.  But noteworthy, is that it is believed that the current human brain is roughly a 1 exaflop computer.  So, it might not be crazy that a device that is sitting on your desk, could be as "smart" as you.  Scary, maybe, but exciting, too.  What will be better?  Here are my thoughts on how the future changes, from the obvious to the super speculative.

One Step Beyond

• Better video games:  Micro-textures?  Water physics modeling?  Good NPCs?
• Emersive Virtual Reality: like really emersive.  Imagine virtual worlds that have been built over years with powerful engineering and artistic tools.
• Even less human-provided customer service: Overseas call centers could be a thing of the past.  Voice recognition will be virtually perfect (instead of really good like it is now).  Small call-centers here to deal with the only most complex customer issues.
• Suggestive Prompts: Personal assistant software will go from mildly annoying to super helpful.  We'll get prompts to remind of us of meaningful things.  Amazon Echo on 'roids.  Stupid example: every time I head into my kitchen in the morning, I have my news briefing played.  But I have to ask for it.  Why shouldn't Alexa just start playing it a few days after I ask for it.  Or at least ask.  Fair enough that we don't need a exa-scale computer to do this, but I'm thinking that this kind of learning and intelligence will be ubiquitous.
• MORE TO COME!!