Text: Dmitry Konstantinov TWENTY YEARS WE WILL USE CELLULAR PHONES, AND EVERYTHING TALKING TALK, AND EVERYTHING WRITTEN WRITING IN MESSENGERS AND SOCIAL NETWORKS. WHAT WILL BE WITH REMOTE COMMUNICATION AFTER A COUPLE OF TEN YEARS? DO WE REFUSE FROM RADIO COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES INVENTED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE PAST CENTURY? LIKE YES. SCIENTISTS PREDICT THAT QUANTUM COMMUNICATION IS ALREADY NEAR THE MOUNTAINS.
Out of range
This thankless task is to make futurological forecasts. It would seem that everything has been taken into account, calculated, a chain of cause-and-effect relationships has been built ... But suddenly, some lover of butterflies comes out, inadvertently intervenes in the course of history, and everything goes differently.
Only futuristic articles for a glossy journal can be worse than futorological forecasts. But much more amazing events are taking place in the world now - say, a jeep from Bentley, Playboy without nudes or the rise of quantum mechanics. At the same time, a couple of publications of the executive class have already spoken about the achievements of the latter, carefully choosing expressions and covering their own competence with quotes from power scientists, as well as the long-suffering Schrödinger cat. Well, we will embark on this slippery path, especially since cats are now in special media space in the media.
So, the Internet every day plays an increasingly significant role in our lives. Voice communication over long distances is increasingly replaced not even by SMS (a little expensive), but by correspondence in instant messengers and social networks. I don’t always want to speak already, or whether it’s a text message, where you can hone the wording slowly and put it in the Internet dictionary for spelling. Cars are also becoming more and more Internet-dependent every day. Fashionable unmanned technologies are based on a cloud service, and it is only a question of which platform to choose - iOS or Android. Porsche didn’t like Google’s designs (they download de-technical data of cars, the actual consumption of all kinds of liquids, actual air pollution and then resell them to competitors), and wise Swabians decided to use the Yabloko products. What can we say about cars if only via the Internet the brake pads of the TGV train developing 400 km / h and the flaps of the Boeing 747 flying at a height of 12 km are already operating soon?
One way or another, a modern smartphone now is a device that uses network technologies for about 90% and the remaining 10 - all sorts of analog things like a telephone radio transmitter, receiver, speaker and microphone. At the same time, it works with the help of the good old ultrashort radio waves in the decimeter range. In a time when even television was finally digitized, radio communications look rather conservative. Again, most of us, if you need to talk with another country, still call on Skype - why pay for expensive roaming if you can do this via the Internet?
Live on the bright side
For the portable radio telephones that came into mass use in the 90s, you need to thank the military - it was on their budgets from a radio relay station that could hardly fit in the back of an army truck, it was possible to make the first mobile phone weighing "only" three kilograms. In 1998, rapidly "losing weight", but still controlled by nine buttons, mobile phones receive a touch screen. The era of smartphones begins, with which the phone more and more becomes not just a means of communication, but a mobile computer. A huge number of mobile applications that appeared over time made the device even more functional. So, an iPhone does a alcohol test now, and it will be possible to pay them like a credit card or take it to the subway almost tomorrow.
The day after tomorrow, most likely, they will all “lose weight” again, becoming flexible and transparent, since they will receive a graphene display invented in 2010 in industrial volumes. But this will only be restyling, because it will not affect the main principle of the smartphone - a transistor computer with a radio transmitter.
Obvious-probable
In July 2015, at the Moscow International Conference on Quantum Technologies, the head of the university department in Karlsruhe, Alexei Ustinov, extremely clearly explained to the audience the advantages of quantum computing systems, as well as the obvious need for their early implementation. The fact is that the entire electronic payment system is now based on the RSA protocol, developed in 1977. In accordance with it, the lock to any bank account or credit card is a number consisting of approximately 400 digits. The key, it is the pin code, is a four-digit number by which the lock number is divisible without a remainder. To pick a pin code using random combinations, a classic computer will need 4.5 billion years - the age of the Earth. Quantum will do this in three years.
Of course, Professor Ustinov did not urge to acquire quantum computers for opening bank accounts, he only warned that the appearance of such machines among hackers could bring down the global financial system very quickly if it was not already being rebuilt now.
The only possible building module for creating new computing systems was a quantum bit (qubit), which was synthesized for industrial use only last year. The current qubit model is the most schematically reminiscent of an electric transformer. Inside this model, photons are caught and "trained", asking them the desired spin, that is, the magnetic moment. As a result, photons with the same spin will behave identically at any distance. That is, if you change one, the other will change in the same way over thousands of kilometers. Here is such a quantum teleportation.
The world's first quantum bit was obtained in the laboratory in 2001 by IBM. In April 2015, Intel "brought out" in its laboratory a superconducting quadrangular qubit, much more "workable".
In May of the same year, their qubit was synthesized at the Russian Quantum Center in Skolkovo. The first quantum computers - still huge cupboard refrigerators with an operating temperature close to absolute zero - now work in defense departments, NASA, Lockheed Martin Corporation and the main players in the computer market - Google, Microsoft, IBM. A 128-qubit quantum computer manufactured by the Canadian company D-Wave Systems today costs about $ 11 million.
The beginning of the mass application of quantum computers, Alexey Ustinov dates back to 2025, which coincides with the forecast of Mike Mayberry, vice president of Intel Corporation.
Adding Moore's law to this, we get the very obvious probability of the appearance of quantum smartphones in another ten years. Judge for yourselves: quantum batteries operating much longer than ion batteries have already been announced. Displays where quantum dots work instead of LEDs are already sold under the name of 4K TVs. The recent elections in Switzerland were held using closed quantum communication channels between polling stations and the CEC, while MagiQ Technologies, a New York-based company, is selling to everyone a Navajo quantum cryptographic key generator, named after the Indian tribe whose language was used by American cryptographers during World War II war. The secret was simple - no one in the world knew this language.
Connected by one network
Suppose a quantum smartphone has already been created. But what will happen to the Global Network, with all the much-needed Instagram, Facebook, Twitter? How will the quantum revolution change them?
The future of social networks is quite predictable if, in a streamlined way, we combine the trends of recent years with technological progress. Firstly, social networks developed intensively only in the first years of its existence. Having reached the peak of saturation with options like, they began to develop extensively, that is, taking into account social stratification. So, today we are observing at least three types of social networks that are “tailored” to the level of user IQ (in Russia, these are Facebook, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki). In addition, there are networks oriented to the psychotype: for creativity of talkative extroverts (Livejournal), silent introverts (Instagram) or business logicians (Linkedin).
This kind of classification is very arbitrary and controversial, but do not forget about the fact that when Mark Zuckerberg purchased Instagram in 2013, he received millions of new users - those who were shy not only to write to FB, but even to create accounts there. The development of technologies, an increase by an order of magnitude of the speed of data transmission through quantum communication, as well as the expansion of portable storage volumes of this data in the future, will lead to the creation of new formats of social networks.
For example, it will be possible to shoot and upload and, importantly, preserve memories. Flying away to distant stars on a quantum cargo ship, the team will more easily survive separation from families if they take with them a three-dimensional film library of the best moments of life together.
It is possible that the bloggers' albums will also contain code commands for a 3D printer, which can be shared with friends or anyone who wants to print original cookie recipes, shoes or evening dresses. And, of course, "correspondence boxing." The heated opponents of ethical and political discussions will finally be able to count each other's teeth in a ring that is completely identical to the present.
As conversations become less and less, and conversations in messengers - more and more, it will be fair to assume that the keyboard on future quantphones will be primary, and the microphone-speaker pair will be secondary. Dividing the components of the future phone into parts of the human body: a keyboard "drawn" in the palm of your hand, a speaker in the cochlea of the middle ear and a camera lens that reads commands from the optic nerve and literally removes them from the hands, but from the point of view - all this is quite feasible. But one should not forget such an important detail as a quantum processor, which, for ethical reasons, will have to be turned off in theaters (they will remain) or handed over to security at especially confidential meetings. Given the current opportunity to communicate remotely without using any visible improvised means, the most conservative of us still imitate in public a conversation on an old telephone, pressing it to our ear. Apparently, we will do this in the future, because a person who is talking with his watch has been firmly and forever associated with a bodyguard or an agent of the federal special services. Well, and if such a citizen even talked to himself without visible devices and interlocutors - did he lose his mind?
So that your loved ones do not have to cry
A car equipped with a quantum computer will be able to respond more quickly to the traffic situation and, in the “inhuman” driving mode, will approach the heights of Formula 1 pilots' skill. Most likely, while the career of a four-wheeled carrier of artificial intelligence will repeat the path of automatic control of the aircraft, better known as autopilot. Although for many, driving is still a pleasure, with which they are in no hurry to part.
Back in the middle of the last century, experiments began on driving a car not with arms and legs, but directly with brain impulses. Today they have been successful with the advent of freely available portable brain wave sensor.
Yesterday, scientists said that with the help of thought, a person can control a car and even an unmanned aerial vehicle - for a short while and in a limited space. Today, almost simultaneously, the Chinese Great Wall automaker and the German Volkswagen demonstrate non-serial E-class sedans, which are controlled by the “power of thought” using a 16-sensor headset.
In this case, duplicate manual control of the machine is saved. Tomorrow, such a management may well be finalized to automotive safety standards and put on the rails of mass production - the main thing is that there is demand. Most likely, it will arise among all the same representative class. Deprived of the steering wheel and pedals, the interior of the "brain car" will become much more comfortable, the dynamic characteristics will directly depend on intelligence, in a word, a new symbol of luxury and life success will appear in the consumer society.
The future is up to you
Today, the World Wide Web is pleased with the stable LTE connection in large cities. Tomorrow we are promised LTE Advance, which will "accelerate" to a gigabyte per second, and the day after tomorrow, that is, by 2020, a 5G network with smart antennas that will adjust their range depending on traffic. At the same time, work is underway to make the Network truly global. Richard Branson’s OneWeb project envisages launching 648 satellites into orbit with a further increase in their number to 2400.
The project today is estimated at $ 2 billion, and its initial task is to "patch up holes" where it is problematic to conduct Internet by laying fiber optic cable. Elon Musk offers a similar project, but at a cost of already 10 billion. At it, the general investor of Tesla and Space X plans to test the connection for his first Martian city. Both developments, with a certain difference in approaches, pursue a good goal: to make the Internet free and something to take for granted on the entire surface of the planet.
Considering the prospects of remote communication based on the quantum principle of communication, Eugene Polzik, professor of physics at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, makes at least 10% errors with the current level of technology. That is, a bouquet of roses sent to the same Martian city in the attachment may turn out to be orchids. Thank you professor, that’s enough. The first telephones were also hard to hear.
The main thing is that the process goes. According to Alexei Ustinov, scientists have already played a role in the quantum revolution - it's up to the engineers. It is very possible that it will be our honor to observe a radical change in the formats of remote communication and vote for the news with our consumer wallet. After all, as Albert Einstein said, "the border between the present and the future does not exist for those who believe in science."
It is possible that the “science city” of Masdar City, which is being built 17 km southeast of Abu Dhabi, will soon be engaged in quantum technologies in the United Arab Emirates. The local university has the status of a branch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is in full swing developing new desalination technologies and solar energy processing. And where are the photons, as you know, there are quanta ... Meanwhile, last April in Dubai, they played the next final of the Microsoft Imagine Cup international student competition. It was recognized as the best work of Australian students Jennifer Teng and Jarrela Sia - Eyenaemia neurointerface, which allows people with paralyzed limbs to control computers and other household appliances using brain impulses.
In October 2015, the international IT company Imex System, which located one of its offices in Dubai in Jumeirah, held the first master class with the leadership of the local tourism industry on the introduction of guide robots.
Based on the IBM Watson cognitive platform used in medicine and business, electronic guides will recognize human speech and respond with enviable speed.
