Ten science and technology trends in 2020
2020 is such a sci-fi year. Stepping into 2020, it seems to return to the long lost future. With the beginning of the new decade of science and technology, the long-standing intelligent revolution will usher in a disruptive technological change. Today, the Dharma academy released the top ten science and technology trends in 2020. I hope to witness the long-awaited or unexpected changes with you, and follow the curve of technological evolution to find where we come from and where we are going.
Trend one: the evolution of artificial intelligence from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence
[summary of trends] artificial intelligence has reached or surpassed the human level in the field of perceptual intelligence such as "listening, speaking and seeing", but it is still in its infancy in the field of cognitive intelligence that needs external knowledge, logical reasoning or domain transfer. Cognitive intelligence will draw inspiration from cognitive psychology, brain science and human social history, and combine cross domain knowledge mapping, causal reasoning, continuous learning and other technologies to establish an effective mechanism for stable acquisition and expression of knowledge, so that knowledge can be understood and used by machines, and realize the key breakthrough from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence.
Trend 2: integration of computing and storage breaks through the bottleneck of AI computing power
[trend summary] the separation of storage and computing in von Neumann architecture is no longer suitable for data-driven AI applications. The bottleneck of computing power and power consumption caused by frequent data handling has become a limiting factor for the exploration of more advanced algorithms. The in memory computing architecture, which is similar to the brain neural structure, integrates the data storage unit and the computing unit into one, which can significantly reduce the data handling and greatly improve the computing parallelism and energy efficiency. The innovation of hardware architecture of integration of computing and storage will break through the bottleneck of AI computing power.
Trend 3: super convergence of industrial Internet
[trend summary] the rapid development of 5g, IOT devices, cloud computing and edge computing will promote the super integration of industrial Internet and realize the intelligent integration of industrial control system, communication system and information system. Manufacturing enterprises will realize equipment automation, transportation automation and production scheduling automation, so as to realize flexible manufacturing. At the same time, the upstream and downstream manufacturing lines of the factory can be adjusted and coordinated in real time. This will greatly improve the production efficiency of the factory and the profitability of the enterprise. For industries with output value of several trillion or even hundreds of trillion yuan, increasing the efficiency by 5% - 10% will produce the value of trillions of RMB.
Trend 4. Large scale cooperation between machines is possible
[trend summary] traditional single agent intelligence cannot meet the real-time perception and decision-making of large-scale intelligent devices. The development of Internet of things (IOT) collaborative sensing technology and 5g communication technology will realize the cooperation among multiple agents, that is, machines cooperate with each other and compete with each other to complete the target tasks. The swarm intelligence brought by multi-agent cooperation will further enlarge the value of intelligent system: large-scale intelligent traffic light scheduling will realize dynamic real-time adjustment, warehouse robots will cooperate to complete the efficient cooperation of goods sorting, unmanned vehicles can sense the global road conditions, and group UAV cooperation will effectively open the last kilometer distribution.
Trend 5: modularization reduces the threshold of chip design
[trend summary] the traditional chip design mode cannot effectively cope with the demand of rapid iteration, customization and fragmentation. The open instruction set represented by risc-v and its corresponding open source SOC chip design, high level abstract hardware description language and IP based template chip design method promote the rapid development of chip agile design method and open source chip ecology. In addition, the modular design method based on chiplet uses advanced packaging method to package different functional "chip modules" together, which can quickly customize a chip that meets the application requirements and further speeds up the chip delivery.
Trend 6. Large scale production level blockchain application will enter the public
A summary of blockchain
Service) will further reduce the threshold for enterprises to apply blockchain technology, and hardware chips specially designed for blockchain end, cloud and chain solidifying core algorithms will emerge at the historic moment, realizing the anchoring of physical world assets and assets on the chain, further expanding the boundary of value Internet and realizing the interconnection of ten thousand chains. In the future, a large number of innovative blockchain application scenarios and multi-dimensional cooperation across industries and ecology will emerge, and large-scale production level blockchain applications with daily life of more than 10 million will enter the public.
Trend 7: quantum computing enters a critical period
[summary of trends] the debate on "quantum hegemony" in 2019 makes quantum computing the focus of world science and technology once again. The achievements of superconducting quantum computing chips have enhanced the industry's optimistic expectation of superconducting routes and the pace of large-scale quantum computing. In 2020, the field of quantum computing will go through the stages of increasing investment, intensifying competition, accelerating industrialization and enriching ecology. As the two most critical technological milestones, fault-tolerant quantum computing and demonstration of practical quantum advantages will be the turning point of quantum computing. In the next few years, it will be a very difficult task to really achieve any of them, and quantum computing will enter a critical period of technology.
New materials promote semiconductor device innovation
[trend summary] under the dual pressure of the slowing down of Moore's law and the explosion of computing power and storage demand, it is difficult for the classic transistors with silicon as the main body to maintain the sustainable development of the semiconductor industry. The major semiconductor manufacturers have no clear answer to the trend of chips below 3 nm. New materials will realize new concepts and devices of logic, storage and interconnection through new physical mechanisms, and promote the innovation of semiconductor industry. For example, topological insulator, two-dimensional superconductor and so on