Intel's BIG science

Tim Dean reports on the crazy big science Intel's R&D arm is working on.

Intel doesn’t muck around when it comes to research. In fact, Intel as a company spends more on pure research than does Australia as a nation. We’re talking $US6 billion devoted to exploring the far reaches of technological capability, and not all of it focussing on processor technology. And on day two of the Fall IDF in Taiwan, recently, the gathered technophiles were treated to a sneak peek of some of the wild and wondrous creations that lie just over the horizon.

The scene was set by some precipitous forecasting from none other than technology’s Chief Hyperbolist, Ray Kurzweil. When it comes to the future, few have laid down more concrete – or astounding – predictions than Kurzweil. Not only does he see technological advancement as possessing some kind of inevitability, but he suggests it’s only a matter of time before the exponential increase in processing power leads us to developing machines that are more intelligent than us. (Then again, I’ve watch enough trash TV to think many of us may have overrated human intelligence in the first place...) When this day comes, we’ll have reached a "profoundly transformative" moment that Kurzweil calls – with his usual knack for understatement – the 'singularity', because what happens beyond this point is virtually unpredictable.

The question that Intel is focussing on is not when this day will come (or why we might want it to come at all), but how to get there. Intel Senior Fellow and research guru, Kevin Kahn, laid out a number of 'gaps' to be overcome between computers and people. They were:

• Computing - referring to raw processing power.
• Sensing - which is the ability for machines to observe what’s going on outside their little beige boxes.
• Signalling - or how they communicate to each other and to us.
• Power - which is a big problem when you think that Google now builds its data centres near power stations.
• Actuation - which is making them actually move and interact with the world.