Future of Computing

Introduction

For the past two decades, personal technology has made incredible advancement, bringing us into a fast paced, digital world that we live in today. In the 1980s we had supercomputers that took up the space of a whole room and today we all have computers with much more processing power than the supercomputers of the 80s, and they are the computers that are in our pockets. With personal computers becoming smarter and easier to access everyday, there is no telling what daily life will be like in the next twenty years. This technology runs everybody’s lives and it will continue to do more running of people’s lives every year. We can only guess what is next for computing.

Today’s computers

For the past ten years our lives have depended on smartphones and other devices like tablet, laptops and now things like the Amazon Alexa that can answer any question you can think of. Ever since the unveiling of the first iphone in 2007, many other companies have created their own versions of the smartphone, each company tries to outperform the other ones every time they create a new phone. This has caused exponential growth of the cell phone industry and cell phone technology. Smartphones are the most common computer in many people’s lives and that is because they can do anything from making calls to buying things online and posting pictures and videos. Every device made today connects to the cloud and being connected helps link the whole world together. Everybody today is linked to the rest of the world through the internet. Some people think being connected in this way is bad for our lives and puts us at risk for information and control being stolen. But others think it is bringing us to a more advanced society. There is a lot of controversy today about whether all of these new advancements in personal technology is helping or hurting us. Which ever side is right will show in the near future. The next stages of computing will contribute to this image of the future.

Quantum Computing

Quantum computers are not regular machines that sit on the top of a desk, next to a bed, or in your pocket. Quantum computers are computers that have hundreds of times more of the processing power of a regular computer. One of these computers would be like a modern version of a room sized computer from the 80s. A regular computer has binary circuits called “bits” that shows only two states, either a 1 or a 0. In a quantum computer it uses qubits instead of bits. Qubits are able to show a 1 and a 0 at the same time. This allows qubits to process several programs at once and at nearly the speed of light. The way that they can process more than one set of information at a time is because inside the processor chip they have it frozen to a temperature just above absolute zero, where they can have as little electron movement as possible. Any sounds or vibrations can throw off the electrons in the processor and they could show incorrect information. Since they have stopped most electron movement they can spin the electron as fast as they possibly can. The fast spin allows the qubit to show more than just a one or a zero at one time. The process of spinning the electron and creating more than one and even more than two states is called superposition. A quantum computer may one day become something that everyone can own and we could carry around with us everyday, the same way a supercomputer from the 80s has been shrunken down and put into our phones. The world could have great amounts of electronic growth if everyone had a quantum computer.

DNA Sequencing

DNA sequencing is the process of using computers and many different types of medical equipment to scan through DNA and write out the nucleotides in order. By using DNA sequencing we can determine the exact order of the adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine.With this technology we can get into DNA the same way we can crack an encrypted code. In 2001, scientists used different methods of DNA sequencing to sequence a whole human genome. As the years have gone by, DNA sequencing has become an important and essential part to many fields of medicine including: biological systematics, forensics, biotechnology, and diagnosis.