Marc Andreessen, the creator of the Mosaic browser, asserted that software was consuming the planet in 2011. He was right, but the “digital” world was largely eaten by software. Now that it has moved from bits to atoms, we can see it starting to consume the physical universe. We are now beginning to solve considerably more challenging challenges.
At this historical turning point, compute becomes essentially unbounded. Cloud computing will redefine how software services are delivered in the physical world, just as it did in the digital one. The most intricate physical objects, like our planet and our bodies, can be made into digital counterparts that we can then alter for the better.
Imagine a scenario in which extinction-level dangers like climate change can be promptly addressed thanks to an Earth model. Imagine a future in which the cost of developing new drugs is so low that we can all benefit from medicines that are specifically tailored to our unique DNA and specific health issues.
At the speed of light innovation
Today, innovation progresses at the same rate as computation. Benefits that we can’t even currently comprehend are promised by unconstrained computing. In the past, computing was so expensive in the real world that attempts to solve problems, like sending a man to the moon, required large-scale government spending.
The time has come to broaden our goals and think far more broadly. Innovation has the capacity to address the technical problems that lie ahead of us, just as human creativity has in the past responded to the demands of the time.
What if we used unrestricted computing to examine our globe and our bodies? What could we possibly achieve? We get at this future thanks to the idea of digital twins.
In computing, we’ve come a long way
The CDC 6600 was a single-processor supercomputer that was capable of 3 million computations per second. It was the undisputed leader in supercomputing in 1964. The current smartphone is at least a million times faster, despite the fact that this may sound remarkable. High-performance computers delivered processing speeds that were slower than the most recent iPhone even before the 1990s.
That’s altered by the cloud. Researchers can only partially and expensively replicate the physical world within data centres thanks to a technique we coined “high performance computing,” which involves pooling enormous computing resources.
Using digital twins, you may find and test solutions Online
We can start developing potential answers to problems faster and test them on our digital twins first as we generate digital twins of our physical selves and our world. Beyond the changes brought about by software devouring the digital world and bringing us social media, “likes,” simpler travel, and easier banking, this will have enormous effects on the quality of our lives.
Developing new strategies to reduce CO2 emissions in order to cool a warming planet is far more difficult than NFT of a bored digital monkey.
Statistical workarounds are currently used in climate models to assess the climate on a global basis but make it difficult to comprehend local effects. For forecasting and directly addressing the regional effects of climate change, models’ resolution must be increased.
Even greater potential is seen in healthcare
AI forecasts may enable us to anticipate health issues.
Today, AI is able to forecast how proteins in the human genome and those of other creatures will fold. Anticipating protein folding could speed up drug development, which raises expectations that AI will transform healthcare.
Deep learning’s potential to speed up drug development is only now being fully understood by researchers, but there is already so much enthusiasm for the technology that a cottage economy of firms with a focus on AI-powered drug discovery has developed.
Digital twins have great promise for facilitating the individualization of medical therapies for patients in light of their distinct genetic make-up, anatomy, behaviour, and other variables. The medical world has recently been urged by the Alan Turing Institute to work together on shared scaling digital twins.
The idea that marginal costs eventually reach virtually zero is one of the frequently misunderstood realities in software. Everybody wants to live. Therefore, one of the most fascinating markets to be impacted by this new world will be medication discovery. The cost of bringing a new treatment to market today is from $2 billion to $4 billion on average, so big businesses like Amazon or Walmart may enter the pharmaceutical industry to reduce healthcare spending, which is one of their biggest expense categories.
Technology has no bias. We are merely haphazardly organised humans in the end. We’ll need to come up with strategies to adapt as best we can to this increased power as we enter a world free of computational limitations.