Wanted: Information on the Information Age

2012

We are moving towards the information society, and we need to overcome the discouraging perspective, which is caused by the false belief that our thoughts (and thereby also our acting) represent a somehow externally existing world. Indeed, it is already a step forward to proclaim that there exists a somehow common world for all people. But if those internal forms of representation are primarily bound to the subject itself, then, consequently, anybody can argue for his or her view of the world as being the "right" one. Well, what is the exit strategy out of this dilemma? It is information; information as understood in its actual and potential dimension, in its identity of structure and meaning. Such an approach requires a deeper elaborated conceptual approach. The goal of this study is to show that such a concept is glued by the strong relationship between seemingly unrelated disciplines: physics, semantics (semiotics/cognition) and computer science, and even poetry. But the terminus of information is nowadays discussed and elaborated in all those disciplines. Hence, there is no shortcut, no way around. The aim of this study is not even to show that those strong relationships exist. We will see within the same horizon that, based on such a concept, new kinds of computing systems are becoming possible. Nowadays energy consumption is becoming a major issue regarding computing systems. We will work towards an approach, which enables new devices consuming a minimum amount of energy and maximizing the performance at the same time. And within the same horizon it becomes possible to release the saved energy towards a new ethical spirit-towards the information society.

This article aims to present how the computer, humanity's greatest invention, evolved and how its most likely future will be. The computer is humanity's greatest invention because the worldwide computer network made possible the use of the Internet as the technology that most changed the world with the advent of the information society. IBM developed the mainframe computer starting in 1952. In the 1970s, the dominance of mainframes began to be challenged by the emergence of microprocessors. The innovations greatly facilitated the task of developing and manufacturing smaller computers - then called minicomputers. In 1976, the first microcomputers appeared whose costs represented only a fraction of those practiced by manufacturers of mainframes and minicomputers. The existence of the computer provided the conditions for the advent of the Internet which is undoubtedly one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, whose development took place in 1965. At the beginning of the 21st century, cloud computing emerged, which symbolizes the tendency to place all the infrastructure and information available digitally on the Internet. Current computers are electronic because they are made up of transistors used in electronic chips that have limitations given that there will be a time when it will no longer be possible to reduce the size of one of the components of the processors, the transistor. Quantum computers have been shown to be the newest answer in Physics and Computing to problems related to the limited capacity of electronic computers. Canadian company D-Wave claims to have produced the first commercial quantum computer. In addition to the quantum computer, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can reinvent computers.

International Journal of …, 2011

There is no field more challenging than information processing and computers. The field change significantly almost every month, it is a field that combines all other disciplines, and almost everybody needs a working knowledge because virtually everybody now uses ...

Progress in computer technology over the last four decades has been spectacular, driven by Moore's Law which, though initially an observation, has become a selffulfilling prophecy and a board-room planning tool.

We hear the word information technology and we think we know what it is, we think it is about computers and smartphones, but it is becoming much more than this, as computing converges with biotechnology and nanotechnology with the Internet of Things, cloud computing and smart systems, every type of technology is becoming an information technology. Some talk about disruptive technology, some about the information revolution, either way, there is a profound transformation taking place in our technology landscape. A true revolution that is shaking every industry; that is literally redefining how we understand technology and ourselves. Technology that we once thought of as physical tools and machines is no longer so, as a wave of information that started with personal computing and the internet is breaking out into the real world of physical things. Today information is out of its box and it is redefining our technology landscape. Technology is no longer a one-off object that performs some physical operation, as we network our world placing sensors and actuators in all kinds of objects, technologies are becoming more like systems for executing on algorithms. Phones that just ten years ago were lumps of plastic and electronics with buttons for making calls have become smartphones that are designed to simply run code. Cars are becoming smart cars, whole cities are becoming smart cities with all of this technology increasingly connected up to the cloud where smart systems run analytics, crunching vast amounts of data, learning and feeding it back to the devices to optimize their performance. This paper explores this new wave of information technology that is coming at us at light speed and disrupting every business and industry. We look at the emergence of a new architecture to our technology landscape based around cyber-physical systems and digital platforms. Finally, we discuss the implications of this new set of technologies to society, asking fundamental questions about the rapidly evolving relationship between computers and humans and how to develop this next generation of technologies in a socially sustainable fashion.

Papers and discussions presented at the December 3-5, 1958, eastern joint computer conference: Modern computers: objectives, designs, applications on XX - AIEE-ACM-IRE '58 (Eastern), 1958

Progress in computer technology over the last four decades has been spectacular, driven by Moore's Law which, though initially an observation, has become a selffulfilling prophecy and a board-room planning tool. Although Gordon Moore expressed his vision of progress simply in terms of the number of transistors that could be manufactured economically on an integrated circuit, the means of achieving this progress was based principally on shrinking transistor dimensions, and with that came collateral gains in performance, power-efficiency and, last but not least, cost.

ACM Sigpc Notes, 1979