siliconindia | | June 20209As of September 12, 2018, Waymo was waiting on permits to test the cars in California, hoping to test in Los Altos, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. On Oc-tober 30, 2018, the California Department of Motor Ve-hicles issued a permit for Waymo to operate fully driver-less cars (i.e., cars without human safety drivers). Waymo was the first company to receive such a permit, which al-lows day and night testing on public roads and highways, in California. In July 2019, Waymo was given permission by Califor-nia regulators to transport passengers in its vehicles. Act 4: Quantum ComputingOn 23 October 2019, Google Brain (Google AI), in part-nership with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Ad-ministration, officially claimed that its Sycamore quantum processor completed in 200 seconds, a task the equivalent of which would take a state-of-the-art supercomputer ap-proximately 10,000 years to complete. Investigation in Quantum Computing was accelerated in the early 1980s, when physicist Paul Benioff proposed a quantum mechanical model of the Turing Machine. Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin later suggested that a quantum computer could perform simulations that are out of reach for regular computers. In 1994, PeterShor devel-oped a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for factoring integers. This was a major breakthrough in the subject: an important method of asymmetric key exchange known as RSA is based on the belief that factoring integers is com-putationally difficult (from Wikipedia Page on Quantum Computing).The Evolution Continuum: Big History & Human-Machine CollaborationIn the beginning, there was nothing; and then there was a big bang! Well, not literally, but there was a huge explosion dated back to over 13 billion years ago, that was big enough to create the universe as we know. Interestingly, that was also when time started! Big History Project, funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and contributed by research-ers all over the world is meant to provide a scientific ex-planation of history as it really unveiled leading to human domination of planet earth. Big Bang was termed as:Threshold 1: Beginning of a Beginning. Threshold 2: Stars Light UpThreshold 3: New Chemical Elements formed, and Stars forge Matter in the UniverseThreshold 4: Earth & The Solar System: Morsels of gas and rock created our homeThreshold 5: Life On Earth: Life evolves, adapts and thrivesThreshold 6: Collective LearningThreshold 7: Agriculture ­ Farming sows the seeds of civilizationThreshold 8: The Modern Revolution ­ Man Machine CollaborationA poll was conducted (and is still running in the back-ground of this massive intellectual collaboration across ge-ographies) on what could possibly be the future of human race; the answers are as follows:- 15.3% people says that Humans will Evolve into an-other Species (supporting Darwin's theory)- 25.5% visualizes a Traumatic Regression (or mass ex-tinction by asteroid, like what happened to the Dinosaurs- 26% says there will be Extra-Terrestrial Exploration- 33.2% says, there would be True AIFrom crowed-source knowledge, True AI is probably what's going to be the future, if not distant, than in the near view. In essence, there is going to be a larger and deeper collaboration between human and machines. However, there could be a continuity of a distinct difference. Whole human can transfer all the learning to a computer and make it learn the logical decision-making process; we are prob-ably far off from making the machine act on "Emotions", the true ingredient of an understanding of the behavioral self. What Nobel Laureate Venki Ramakrishnan named as Ribosomes, as a true integrator of our DNA, and therefore the fountain of everything that we are; is unlikely going to be built in a machine form. Final Act: The Knowledge ApartheidAs we progress on Modern Revolution, there would be an evolution of sorts of the society, and that could probably be categorized as (a) The Innovators: People who will make the Machines and therefore Influence the Law and Societal Rules ­ this is amply evident with Autonomous Vehicles currently (b) The Machines and (c) The Plebs: People who would be at the mercy of both (a) and (b). This is probably why, there is such an increased inter-est to study data mining, machine learning, artificial intel-ligence. No-one wants to be left behind! Big History Project, funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and contributed by researchers all over the world is meant to provide a scientific explanation of history as it really unveiled leading to human domination of planet earth
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