Happy New Year! Celebrating the new year is, of course, all about reminiscing about the past year. And, for technology, this past year was a nuclear blast with the coming of age of artificial intelligence.
I have always thought that history would tell that the most spectacular generation for experiencing technological innovation would have been that of my grandmother. As a young girl, the only way for her to get around was on horseback or in a buggy. She then lived through the invention of the automobile, the airplane, and finally rockets to the moon. I can only imagine how dumbfounding it must have been to see the time to travel from coast to coast shrink from weeks if not months to a matter of hours. Now, I am starting to wonder if history will change its mind and anoint my generation as the most spectacular one in which to have lived.
When I was doing my undergraduate work in electronic engineering at UCLA, I took the department’s first class in circuit design using transistors instead of vacuum tubes. Both devices could be used as the most basic building block of a computer (i.e. something that was either on or off). I was so amazed at the progress at the time. We went from a glass tube about an inch in diameter and several inches tall, that was too hot to touch, to a little metal can about a quarter of an inch around and tall that never even felt warm. I still remember that the transister came in what was called a T03 can.
Only a few years later, chips emerged that contained hundreds of transisters. Today, a single artificial intelligence chip contains north of 200 billion transistors.
AI would still be a research concept were it not for data centers. Today’s data centers wire together some 100,000 AI chips into a new kind of super computer. Then, the real power behind AI comes from its access to multiple data centers.
It is estimated that, worldwide, there are as many as 12,000 data centers. And, as we read, thats not nearly enough.
The only way to relate to the grand total of the number of transistors (like my little T03 cans) being used by today’s AI is to think in terms of the grains of sand on the earth!
And, that is only AI. It is also estimated that there may be as many as 9 billion cellphones in use today.
And then there is the internet. When I was designing circuits with those little T03 cans, the reigning connection to remote computers was over traditional telephone lines at a speed not much faster than you could type on the company’s shared modem. Now, we are talking about 5GB internet connections in every home.
So yes, I am grateful and amazed to say that my generation may become the most amazing generation in the history of mankind to experience human innovation.
