The New Era of Cognitive Computing is upon us. This is not an incremental change and increase in technology. This is a fundamental and exponential rise in non-biological or artificial intelligence.
New Era of Cognitive Computing
We are fast-approaching an era of cognitive systems. This new era is not an incremental change. It signifies a fundamental shift in how machines interact with us and the environment -- where machines will, for example, see images the way we do.
Cognitive systems: A New Era of Computing
(IBM Research) Over the past few decades, Moore's Law, processor speed and hardware scalability have been the driving factors enabling IT innovation and improved systems performance. But the von Neumann architecture — which established the basic structure for the way components of a computing system interact — has remained largely unchanged since the 1940s. Furthermore, to derive value, people still have to engage with computing systems in the manner that the machines work, rather than computers adapting to interact with people the way they work. With the continuous rise of big data, that's no longer good enough.
We now are entering the Cognitive Systems Era, in which a new generation of computing systems is emerging with embedded data analytics, automated management and data-centric architectures in which the storage, memory, switching and processing are moving ever closer to the data.
Whereas in today's programmable era, computers essentially process a series of "if then what" equations, cognitive systems learn, adapt, and ultimately hypothesize and suggest answers. Delivering these capabilities will require a fundamental shift in the way computing progress has been achieved for decades.
Dharmendra Modha - Manager, Cognitive Computing, IBM Research
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