First Photonic Neural Network Unveiled, Turning Point for Mankind

[Arthur Hanson]

With multiple teams (Intel is doing some interesting things in photonics) now starting to get results in photonic computing, the change to optical electronic computing is coming. This will be not only for computing, but used also for building labs on a chip, for a whole family of sensors will be optically based. The semi industry already has much of the technology needed to fabricate these chips, as well as the materials technology. This will start, where Moore's law stops. This will be the turning point in history for mankind as we can see machines smarter than us in sight. This will be the breaking point in history, mankind before true AI and mankind after. In historic terms this puts the semi industry in its infancy right now, with the greatest growth by far ahead. The link below is behind a pay wall but I included it for reference. If anyone knows of any specific companies and their progress or research could you please post. Also this might not be the first, just the first we know of. The chance of just a single effort in this area I feel are slim.





https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...nternal&utm_medium=homepage&utm_source=grid_1

 

[Mitch Heins]

Arthur, this is a very interesting article. I work with companies that develop design automation software for developing photonic integrated circuits like the one mentioned in the article you reference. I've also been doing some studies on Big Data analysis and neural networks are often used to model real world phenomena and those models are then used by businesses to try to predict things like buying behaviors, riskiness of loan applicants, probability of drought conditions and water usage and the list goes on. Today those neural networks are distributed across data center servers but it would be interesting to see how much more could be done if they made use of photonic neural networks. One thing I'm not so sure about is the idea that these machines will in fact be "smarter" than humans. True they could learn much quicker than we can, but you have to wonder where the brain stops and the soul starts. Would make for a lot of good conversations over a beer or two.