SJ113 Master 2

capacity of a few kilobits and went
to work. Apple’s first hard drive, the
ProFile offered 5MB of storage for
£2,700. That’s £540 per MB. Today,
you can run to your local PC World
and pick up a 512GB memory card
– that’s 500,000MB – for the princely
sum of £330 or £0.001 per MB.
The same price for performance
declines hold true across the
technology landscape. In 2017, we
think nothing of the computing
power we hold in our hands, deploy
in our data centres, or access in the
cloud.
We can expect increasingly easy
access to data that will drive change
in our business and personal lives,
too.
Advances in miniaturisation and highspeed
wireless networking mean the
mobile revolution is just beginning.
It’s not hard to imagine that devices
the size of an Apple Watch will soon
have the utility of a home office. And
advances in voice recognition mean
we won’t need to interact with that
tiny screen, we’ll just have to speak
and listen.
Cybersecurity experts are embracing
machine learning, as well, in a game
of leapfrog that pits the black hats’
algorithms against those of the good
guys (see article on page 20).
Big data – and the information
derived from it – is yet another result
of the shrinking cost and growing
availability of massive computing
power and storage capacity. For
example, in medicine, machines can
now scan and compare thousands of
images to spot anomalies, leading to
faster diagnoses. Police departments
can use big data to identify patterns
of activity and deploy resources more
quickly to respond to or even deter,
criminal activity. And businesses can
sift through unlimited amounts of
customer and sales data to identify
triggers and opportunities in the
marketplace.
Cheap data is also driving the rapid
evolution of machine learning. Every
day we interact with algorithms that
determine what we see online – from
friend recommendations on Facebook
to purchase suggestions on Amazon
to the ads that pop up in almost all
our browsers. These machine learning
systems create models based on
existing information and then make
predictions and decisions based on
new data. In other words, they “learn.”
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It’s likely that soon, big data, machine
learning, and nanotechnology –
the manipulation of individual
atoms and molecules – will come
together to address the subtitle
of Kurzweil’s book, When Humans
Transcend Biology.
In the not too distant future, we can
expect microscopic smart machines to
help us fight disease, and allow us to
experience the exponential growth of
technology well into old age.
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