Tag Archives: future

10,000x faster

We wanted to know it

Since mankind developped some good intelligence, we [people] immediately started to discover our world. We walked by foot until we could reach. We domesticated big animals – horses – and rode horses to reach even further, horizontally and vertically. So we reached the water. Horses could not bring us across the seas and oceans. We had to create new technology, that could carry people above the water – ships.

Fantasy map of a flat earth


Ship building required pretty much calculation itself. And ship only is not sufficient to get there. Some navigation needed. We developped both measurement and calulcation of wood and nails, measurement of time, navigation by stars and sides of the world. That was kind of computing. Not the earliest computing ever, but good enough computing that let us to spread the knowledge and vision of our [flat] world.

Wooden computing

Early device for computing was abacus. Though it is usually called a calculating tool or counting frame, we use word computing, becuse this topic is about computing technology. Abacus as computing technology was designed with size bigger than a man, and smaller than a room. Then the wooden computing technology miniaturized to desktop size. This is important: emerged at the size between 1 and 10 meters, and got smaller in time to fit onto dektop. We could call it manual wooden computing too. Wooden computing technology is still in use nowadays in African countries, China, Russia.


Mechanical computing

Metal computing emerged after wooden. Charles Babbage designed his analytical engine from metal gears, to be more precise – from Leibniz wheel. That animal was bigger than a man, and smaller than a room. Below is a juxtaposition of inventor himself with his creation (on the left). Metal computing technology miniaturized in time, and fit into a hand.

Curt Herzstark made really small mechanical calculator, named it Curta (on the right). Curta also lived long, well into the mid of XX century. Nowadays Curta is favorite collectible, priced at $1,000 minimum on eBay, while majority of price tags are around $10,000 for good working device, built in Lichtenstein.


Electro-mechanical computing

Babbage machine became a gym device, when Konrad Zuse designed first fully automatic electro-mechanical machine Z3. Clock speed was 5-10Hz. Z3 was used to model flatter effect for military aircrafts in Nazi Germany. And first Z3 was destroyed during bombardment. Z3 was bigger than a man, and smaller than a room (left photo). Then electro-mechanical computing miniaturized to desktop size, e.g. Lagomarsino semi-automatic calculating machine (right photo).


Here something new happened – growth beyond the size of a room. Harvard Mark I was big electro-mechanical machine, put in big hall. Mark I served for Manhattan Project. There was a problem, how to detonate atomic bomb. Well known von Neumann computed explosive lens on it. Mark I was funded by IBM, Watson Sr.



So, electro-mechanical computing started from the size bigger than a man, smaller than a room, and then evolved in two directions: miniaturized to desktop size, and grown to small stadium size.

Electrical Vacuum Tube computing

At some point, mechanical parts were redesigned to electrical, and first fully electrical machine was created – ENIAC. It used vaccum tubes. Its size was bigger than a man, smaller than a big room (left photo). The fully electrical computing technology on vacuum tubes got miniaturized to desktop size (right photo).


Very interesting and beautiful was miniaturization. Even vacuum tubes could be small and nice. Furthermore, there were many women in the indutry at the time of electrical vacuum tube computing. Below are famous “ENIAC girls”, with the evidence of miniaturization of modules, from left to right, smaller is better. Side question: why women left programming?


ENIAC was very difficult to program. Here is tutorial how to code the modulo function. There were six programmers who could do it really well. ENIAC was intended for balistic computing. But well known same von Neumann from atomic bomb project, got access to it and ordered first ten programs for hydrogen bomb.


Fully automatic electrical machines grew big, very big, bigger than Mark I, II, III etc. They were used for military purposes, and space programs. IBM SAGE on photo, its size is like mid stadium.

Electrical Transistor computing

First fully transistor machine was build probably by IBM, though there is photo of European [second] machine, called CADET (left photo). There were no vacuum tubes in it anymore. Transistor technology is till alive, very well miniaturized to desktop and hand (right photo).


Miniaturization of transistor computing went even further, than size of the hand. Think of small contact lens, small robots in veins, brain implants, spy devices and so on. And transistors are getting smaller and smaller, today 14nm is not a big deal. There is dozen of silicon foundries capable of doing FinFET at such scale.


Transistor computers grew really big, to the size of the stadium. The Earth is being covered by data centers, sized as multiple stadiums. It’s Titan computer on photo, capable of crunching data at the rate of 10 petaFLOPS. The most powerful supercomputer today is Chinese Sunway TaihuLight at 34 petaFLOPS.

But let me remind the point: electrical transistor computing was designed at the size bigger than a man, smaller than a room, and then evolved into tiny robots, and huge supercomputers.

Quantum computing

Designed at the size bigger than a man, smaller than a room.


Everything is a fridge. The magic happens at the edge of that vertical structure, framed by the doorway, 1 meter above the floor. There is a silicon chip, designed by D:Wave, built by Cypress Semiconductor, cooled to absolute zero temperature (-273C). Superconductivity emerges. Quantum physics start its magic. All you need is to shape your problem to the one that quantum machine could run.

It’s somewhat complicated excercise, like modulo function for first fully automatic electrical machines on vacuum tubes years ago. But it is possible. You got to take your time, paper and pen/pencil, and bring your problem to the equivalent Ising model. Then it is easy: give input to quantum machine, switch on, switch off, take output. Do not watch when machine is on, because you will kill the wave features of particles.

Today, D:Wave solves problems 10,000x faster than transistor machines. There is potential to make it 50,000x faster. Cool times ahead!


Why do we need such huge computing capabilities? Who cares? I personally care. Maybe others similar to me, me similar to them. I want to know who we are, what is the world, and what it’s all about.

The Nature does not compute the way we do with transistor machines. As my R&D colleague said about a piece of metal: “You raise the temperature, and solid brick of metal instantly goes liquid. Nature computes it at atomic level, and does it very very fast.” Today one of Chinese supercomputers Tianhe-1A computed behavior of 110 billion atoms during 500,000 evolutions… Is it much? It was only 0.1 nanosecond corresponding to real time, done in three hours of computing.

Let’s do another comparison for same number of atoms. It was about 10^11 atoms. If it was computed at the rate of 1 millisecond, then it would be only 500 seconds, less than 10 minutes. My body has 10 trillions molecules, or about 10^28 atoms. Hence, to simulate entire me during 10 minutes at the level of individual atoms, we would need 10^18x more Tianhe-1A supercomputers… Obviously our current computing is wrong way of computing. Need to invent further. But to invent further, we have to adopt new way of computing – quantum computing.

Who needs such simulations? Here is counter question – what is Intelligence? Intelligence is our capability to predict the future (Michio Kaku). We could compute the future at atomic level and know it for sure. The stronger intelligence is, the more detailed and precise our vision into the future is. As we know the past, and know the future, the understanding of time changes. With really powerful computing, we know for sure what will be in the future as accurately as we know what happened in the past. Distant future is more complicated to compute as distance past. But it is possible, and this is what Intelligence does. It uses computing to know the time. And move in time. In both directions.


All computing technologies together, on one graph, show some pattern. Horizontaly we have time, from past (left) to future (right). Vertically we have scale of sizes, logarithmic, in meters. Red dot shows quantum computing. It is designed already, bigger than a man, smaller than a room. Upper limits are projected bigger than modern transistor supercomputers. Lower is unknown. It’s OK that both transistor and quantum computing technologies coexist and complement each other for a while.


All right, take a look at those charts, imagine quantum lines continuation, what do you see? It is Software is eating the World. Dragon’s tail is on the left, body is in the middle, and the huge mouth is on the right. And this Software Dragon is eating ourselves at all scales. Somebody calls it Digitization.


Software is eating the World, guys. And it’s OK. Right now we could do 10,000x faster computing on quantum machines. Soon we’ll be able to do 50,000x faster. Intelligence is evolving – our ability to see the future and the past. Our pathway to time machine.


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We will fuck robots

We already love machines


Exponential technologies

* biotech and bioinformatics
* computational systems
* networks and sensors
* artificial intelligence
* robotics
* digital manufacturing
* medicine
* nanotech and nanomaterials


Connecting the dots



Rudimentary evidence






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Transformation of Consumption


The Experience Economy





The Invisible Economy




3D Printing



4D Printing


Forecast [on Consumption]





Next Five Years of Healthcare

This insight is related to all of you and your children and relatives. It is about the health and healthcare. I feel confident to envision the progress for five years, but cautious to guess for longer. Even next five years seem pretty exciting and revolutionary. Hope you will enjoy they pathway.

We have problems today

I will not bind this to any country, hence American readers will not find Obamacare, ACO or HIE here. I will go globally as I like to do.

The old industry of healthcare still sucks. It sucks everywhere in the world. The problem is in uncertainty of our [human] nature. It’s a paradox: the medicine is one of the oldest practices and sciences, but nowadays it is one of least mature. We still don’t know for sure why and how are bodies and souls operate. The reverse engineering should continue until we gain the complete knowledge.

I believe there were civilisations tens of thousands years ago… but let’s concentrate on ours. It took many years to start in-depth studying ourselves. Leonardo da Vinci did breakthrough into anatomy in early 1500s. The accuracy of his anatomical sketches are amazing. Why didn’t others draw at the same level of perfection? The first heart transplant was performed only in 1967 in Cape Town by Christiaan Barnard. Today we are still weak at brain surgeries, even the knowledge how brain works and what is it. Paul Allen significantly contributed to the mapping of the brain. The ambitious Human Genome project was performed only in early 2000s, with 92% of sampling at 99.99% accuracy. Today, there is no clear vision or understanding what majority of DNA is for. I personally do not believe into Junk DNA, and ENCODE project confirmed it might be related to the protein regulation. Hence there is still plenty of work to complete…

But even with the current medical knowledge the healthcare could be better. Very often the patient is admitted from the scratch as a new one. Almost always the patient is discharged without proper monitoring of the medication, nutrition, behaviour and lifestyle. There are no mechanisms, practices or regulations to make it possible. For sure there are some post-discharge recommendations, assignments to the aftercare professionals, but it is immature and very inaccurate in comparison to what it could be. There are glimpses of telemedicine, but it is still very immature.

And finally, the healthcare industry in comparison to other industries such as retail, media, leisure and tourism is far behind in terms of consumer orientation. Even automotive industry is more consumer oriented than healthcare today. Economically speaking, there must be transformation to the consumer centric model. It is the same winning pattern across the industries. It [consumerism] should emerge in healthcare too. Enough about the current problems, let’s switch to the positive things – technology available!

There could be Care Anywhere

We need care anywhere. Either it is underground in the diamond mine, or in the ocean on-board of Queen Mary 2, or in the medical center or at home, at secluded places, or in the car, bus, train or plane.

There is wireless network (from cell providers), there are wearable medical devices, there is a smartphone as a man-in-the-middle to connect with the back-end. It is obvious that diagnostics and prevention, especially for the chronical diseases and emergency cases (first aid, paramedics) could be improved.

care anywhere

I personally experienced two emergency landings, once by being on-board of the six hour flight, second time by driving for the colleague to another airport. The impact is significant. Imagine that 300+ people landed in Canada, then according to the Canadian law all luggage was unloaded, moved to X-ray, then loaded again; we all lost few hours because of somebody’s heart attack.

It could be prevented it the passenger had heart monitor, blood pressure monitor, other devices and they would trigger the alarm to take the pill or ask the crew for the pill in time. The best case is that all wearable devices are linked to the smartphone [it is often allowed to turn on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi in airplane mode]. Then the app would ring and display recommendations to the passenger.

4P aka Four P’s

The medicine should go Personal, Predictive, Preventive and Participatory. It will become so in five years.

Personal is already partially explained above. Besides consumerism, which is a social or economic aspect, there should be really biological personal aspect. We all are different by ~6 million genes. That biological difference does matter. It defines the carrier status for illnesses, it is related to risks of the illnesses, it is related to individual drug response and it uncovers other health-related traits [such as Lactose Intolerance or Alcohol Addiction].

Personal medicine is an equivalent to the Mobile Health. Because you are in motion and you are unique. The single sufficiently smart device you carry with you everywhere is a smartphone. Other wearable devices are still not connected [directly into the Internet of Things]. Hence you have to use them all with the smartphone in the middle.

The shift is from volume to value. From pay to procedures to pay for performance. The model becomes outcome based. The challenge is how to measure performance: good treatment vs. poor bedside, poor treatment vs. good bedside and so on.

Predictive is a pathway to the healthcare transformation. As healthcare experts say: “the providers are flying blind”. There is no good integration and interoperability between providers and even within a single provider. The only rationale way to “open the eyes” is analytics. Descriptive analytics to get a snapshot of what is going on, predictive analytics to foresee the near future and make right decisions, and prescriptive analytics to know even better the reasoning of the future things.

Why there is still no good interoperability? Why there is no wide HL7 adoption? How many years have gone since those initiatives and standards? My personal opinion is that the current [and former] interoperability efforts are the dead end. The rationale is simple: if it worth to be done, it would be already done. There might be something in the middle – the providers will implement interoperability within themselves, but not at the scale of the state or country or globally.

Two reasons for “dead interop”. First is business related. Why should I share my stuff with others? I spent on expensive labs or scans, I don’t want others to benefit from my investments into this patient treatment. Second is breakthrough in genomics and proteomics. Only 20 minutes needed to purify the DNA from the body liquids with Zymo Research DNA Kit. Genome in 15 minutes under $100 has been planned by Pacific Biosciences by this year. Intel invested 100 million dollars into Pacific Biosciences in 2008. Besides gene mechanisms, there are others, not related to DNA change. They are also useful for analysis, predicting and decision making per individual patient. [Read about epigenetics for more details]. There is a third reason – Artificial Intelligence. We already classify with AI, very soon will put much more responsibility onto AI.

Preventive is very interesting transformation, because it is blurring the boarders between treatment and behaviour/lifestyle/wellness and between drugs and nutrition. It is directly related to the chronic diseases and to post-discharge aftercare, even self aftercare. To prevent from readmission the patient should take proper medication, adjust her behaviour and lifestyle, consume special nutrition. E.g. diabetes patients should eat special sugar-free meal. There is a question where drug ends and where nutrition starts? What Coca Cola Diet is? First step towards the drugs?

Pharmacogenomics is on the rise to do proactive steps into the future, with known individual’s response to the drugs. It is both predictive and preventive. It will be normal that mass universal drugs will start to disappear, while narrowly targeted drugs will be designed. Personal drugs is a next step, when the patient is a foundation for almost exclusive treatment.

Participatory is interesting in the way that non-healthcare organisations become related to the healthcare. P&G produce sun screens, designed by skin type [at molecular level], for older people and for children. Nestle produces dietary food. And recall there are Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and even Coca Cola. I strongly recommend to investigate PWC Health practice for the insights and analysis.

Personal Starts from Wearable

The most important driver for the adoption of wearable medical devices is ageing population. The average age of the population increases, while the mobility of the population decreases. People need access to healthcare from everywhere, and at lower cost [for those who retired]. Chronic diseases are related to the ageing population too. Chronic diseases require constant control, interventions of physician in case of high or low measurements. Such control is possible via multiple medical devices. Many of them are smartphone-enabled, where corresponding application runs and “decides” what to tell to the user.

Glucose meter is much smaller now, here is a slick one from iBGStar. Heart rate monitors are available in plenty of choices. Fitness trackers and dietary apps are present as vast majority of [mobile health] apps in the stores. Wrist bands are becoming the element of lifestyle, especially with fashionably designed Jawbone Up. Triceps band BodyMedia is good for calories tracking. Add here wireless weight… I’ve described gadgets and principles in previous posts Wearable Technology and Wearable Technology, Part II. Here I’d like to distinguish Scanadu Scout, measuring vitals like temperature, heart rate, oxymetry [saturation of your hemoglobin], ECG, HRV, PWTT, UA [urine analysis] and mood/stress. Just put appropriate gadgets onto your body, gather data, analyse and apply predictive analytics to react or to prevent.


Personal is a Future of Medicine

If you think about all those personal gadgets and brick mobile phones as sub-niche within medicine, then you are deeply mistaken. Because the medicine itself will become personal as a whole. It is a five year transition from what we have to what should be [and will be]. Computer disappears, into the pocket and into the cloud. All pocket sized and wearable gadgets will miniaturise, while cloud farms of servers will grow and run much smarter AI.

Everybody of us will become a “thing” within the Internet of Things. IoT is not a Facebook [it’s too primitive], but it is quantified and connected you, to the intelligent health cloud, and sometimes to the physicians and other people [patients like you]. This will happen within next 5-10 years, I think rather sooner or later. The technology changes within few years. There were no tablets 3.5 years ago, now we have plenty of them and even new bendable prototypes. Today we experience first wearable breakthroughs, imagine how it will advance within next 3 years. Remember we are accelerating, the technology is accelerating. Much more to come and it will change out lives. I hope it will transform the healthcare dramatically. Many current problems will become obsolete via new emerging alternatives.

Predictive & Preventive is AI

Both are AI. Period. Providers must employ strong mathematicians and physicists and other scientists to create smarter AI. Google works on duplication of the human brain on non-biological carrier. Qualcomm designs neuro chips. IBM demonstrated brainlike computing. Their new computing architecture is called TrueNorth.

Other healthcare participatory providers [technology companies, ISVs, food and beverage companies, consumer goods companies, pharma and life sciences] must adopt strong AI discipline, because all future solutions will deal with extreme data [even All Data], which is impossible to tame with usual tools. Forget simple business logic of if/else/loop. Get ready for the massive grid computing by AI engines. You might need to recall all math you was taught and multiply it 100x. [In case of poor math background get ready to 1000x efforts]

Education is a Pathway

Both patients and providers must learn genetics, epigenetics, genomics, proteomics, pharmacogenomics. Right now we don’t have enough physicians to translate your voluntarily made DNA analysis [by 23andme] to personal treatment. There are advanced genetic labs that takes your genealogy and markers to calculate the risks of diseases. It should be simpler in the future. And it will go through the education.

Five years is a time frame for the new student to become a new physician. Actually slightly more needed [for residency and fellowship], but we could consider first observable changes in five years from today. You should start learning it all for your own needs right now, because you also must be educated to bring better healthcare to ourselves!



Mobile UX: home screens compared


Some time in 2010 I’ve published my insight on the mobile home screens for four platforms: iOS, Android, Winphone and Symbian. Today I’ve noticed it got more than 35K views:)

What now?

What changed since that time? IMHO Winphone home page is the best. Because it allows to deliver multiple locuses of attention, with contextual information within. But as soon as you go off the home screen, everything else is poor there. iOS and Android remained lists of dumb icons. No context, no info at all. The maximum possible is small marker about the number of calls of text messages. And Symbian had died. RIP Symbian.

So what?

Vendors must improve the UX. Take informativeness of Winphone home screen, add aesthetics of iOS graphics, add openness & flexibility of Android (read Android First) and finally produce useful hand-sized gadget.

Winphone’s home screen provides multiple locuses of attention, as small containers of information. They are mainly of three sizes. The smallest box has enough room to deliver much more context information than number of unread text messages. By rendering the image within the box we can achieve the kind of Flipboard interaction. You decide from the image whether you interested in that or not. It is second question how efficiently the box room is used. My conclusion that it is used inefficiently. There are still number of missed calls or texts with much room left unused:( I don’t know why the concept of the small contexts has been left underutilized, but I hope it will improve in the future. Furthermore, it could improve on Android for example. Android ecosystem has great potential for creativity.

May be I visualize this when get some spare time… Keep in touch here or Slideshare.


Web 3.0

What is a future of the Web?



But what we have today?



Revolution happened.



To HTML5 Believers.



We have entered Web 3.0


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