Superconducting neural nets and sentient hardware
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-nist-superconducting-synapse-piece-artificial.html
Seems that in 2017 there was a similar discovery, but using light propagation in place of resistance changes directly between large populations of artificial neurons.
https://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.7.034013
Could this be a monumental step towards truly sentient machines?
It appears that Moore's Law has run out of steam and due to bugs like SPECTRE its now far too complex a problem to be resolved using conventional methods.
A possible construction might be a submicron (28nm) 2-D chip which is large enough not to be significantly affected by quantum effects, with the 3-D silicon/germanium funnel memristor arrays between them and interconnected through TSVs.
This would be "programmed" by the previously mentioned superconducting system which lays down the simpler pre-sentient pathways so that it does not have to start from scratch.
Heating would be far less of a problem due to the very high efficiency, as the whole brain might only need to run at <0.3V and areas not used can be turned off as needed.
Irony: a conventional laptop with a 3D-M array in place of its DDR4 chips might be able to organize and store information far more efficiently.
Perhaps even fix SPECTRE/Meltdown/etc on the fly by compensating for the performance loss incurred by breaking branch prediction.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
