A very significant time

The Coronation of Elizabeth II took place on 2 June 1953 at Westminster Abbey in London. She acceded to the throne at the age of 25 upon the death of her father, George VI, on 6 February 1952.

Although the very first transistor was created in the lab towards the end of 1947, production didn't start until 1951 and the first application to hit the masses, the transistor radio, was demonstrated in August 1953.

Cradled somewhere amongst those very significant dates the Irish Dodo was born,. He has seen the Queen continue her duties into her 95th year as the longest serving British monarch, and seen 50 years of Moore's law obeyed (that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit aka silicon chip should double every two year) so that last year 2.6 trillion transistors were integrated into a single integrated circuit to create a deep learning engine called the Wafer Scale Engine 2.

Back then such advances could not be countenanced. Check out this video The Transistor: a 1953 documentary, anticipating its coming impact on technology with the possibility that, using transistors, a computer might then be small enough to fit into an average room. Little did they know.

What marvels will my grandchildren see and enjoy?  Assuming things continue as they have these last 60 or so years. Things that we cannot even now imagine? A tower of Babel?

Is Google God?

Google was conceived in 1997 - today it is powered by over one million computer servers and processes over one billion search results daily. I remember the very first time I used Google - how much better it was that AltaVista at the time (having just checked out the latter I find it now comparable in speed and relevance).

“Nowadays, where do you go to ask questions? The answer starts with ‘G-o’, and it’s not God” (Steve Wozniak November 2012).

“People always make the assumption that we’re done with search. That’s very far from the case. We’re probably only 5% of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything. Some people could call that Artificial Intelligence.” (Larry Page, 2006).

And then there is Google-X Lab and who knows what secrets they have under wraps?

Good sci-fi is prophetic - with Google's vision and terms like "in the cloud" and "big data" in common usage can we be that far from Orson Scott Card's Jane?

Google search is limited by the repository of public human knowledge contained in the internet. Although it has become an almost assumed part of many of our lives, and although is invaluable in my electronics work, it does not do so well in answering questions of the soul. Try asking it about alternative medicine or biblical interpretation and you will get every view under the sun because, of course, just about every possible view exists under the sun. Typically you will then filter the results in your mind according to your personal beliefs and, hey presto, you find that Google supports your argument! Not very helpful.

When I was first introduced to the TTL Data Book, long, long ago, I was impressed by the common TTL standard that enables an arbitrary selection of chips to be connected together. Thus using only TTL MSI chips I was able to create a simple computer that calculated standard deviations and correlation coefficient between two channels of electronic data. At the time it reminded me, how much more now, of "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them."

Back then these guys apparently didn't get to finish their edifice...