第14章サイバー資源の品質とサイバーコンピューティングのガバナンス

There are many challenges to nanotechnology (NT) platforms and their introduction into society. Nanotechnologies are small (1 billionth of a meter) devices introduced into technology to help the device function in a modified way, hopefully for the betterment of the technology. The process required to develop such technologies is costly, and many different chemicals are involved. What to do with these chemicals once the manufacturing is done is a constant challenge for the NT companies.

The NT contradicts the TRMs thought process about extensibility. NT is created to perform a specific task; it often cannot adapt to new conditions or environments. The NT has a series of functional requirements that it is meant to carry out. Once the NT is introduced into the system, it is difficult to remove the technology.

NT developments are under the supervision of universities and private companies. Since there is competition to advance these technologies, there is not a lot of information sharing between the entities involved. The duplication of effort with the advancement of technologies and the fact that many employees are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement when working for these companies. The industry does not see as much of a turnaround of employees moving from one company to the next because most technology is proprietary.

There are other ethical challenges with NT that the world does not have answers for. NT can be used to create biological weapons and other powerful weapons. Although these weapons can be developed, the question is, should they be? Or why do they need to be? The fear of atomic warfare has shaped the current military forces. Still, the thought of cybersecurity and NT advancing the attack surfaces is scary and challenging to society. The use of NT to enhance human abilities is also in question. Should NT be used to improve the human brain or muscle system? Can we use NT to enhance beasts of burden to work harder and longer during the day? This would create a divide between wealthy people who could afford the NT implants and those who could not. The technology divide between classes would grow even more. The NT’s most significant challenge is the simplest of questions: Is it needed?

Super-societies cannot exist without advanced technology. This means that data warehousing and communications must be at the performance scale’s extreme top end. Supercomputers, often called clusters or parallel computers, are made to share resources and interconnect processing CPUs. The CPUs are grouped in nodes where the communication mediums between the nodes are of high quality and have the fastest speeds. The power and speed of a supercomputer is based on the number of nodes the computer possesses. Researchers have tried to enhance the supercomputers through NT and mimic the human nervous system. The neuromorphic systems try to emulate the nervous system and the way the brain works to deliver information. In this area, IBM has done extensive research, creating the IBM TrueNorth chip and the Intel Loihi 2 chip. These will eventually replace IBM’s Eagle Quantum computer, one of today’s top supercomputers.

The TRM challenges introduced through the supercomputer are availability and quality. Most families do not have supercomputers in their homes and do not have access to them. Therefore, unless you are a research scientist working for these organizations, you will probably never have the opportunity to interface with this type of computer. The second challenge of quality is a difficult challenge to measure. Quality with supercomputers comes in different forms. The first is based on speed and efficiency. If the computer is doing what it needs to do and the outcome is accurate, it is usually okay with the users. The second challenge is correlated with speed, which is information accuracy. Many supercomputers produce data at an alarming rate, and it is difficult to check that data in real-time before it can be used in other calculations. Implementing algorithms needs to be unit-tested, and quality assurance is a must. Quality has many meanings to different people, and a computer that can perform tasks as fast as a supercomputer can also be used for malicious purposes. Since the cost of these computers is at the extremely high end of the industry, they are mostly found in government agencies and defense agencies. Using a supercomputer to perform hacking techniques could either ensure success because of the raw computer power, or it could be used to supply the ultimate denial of service attacks.

Super-computers are ideal for analyzing big data. Using these computers to perform calculations on data sets that are generally not manageable by regular computers could advance technology and industries in ways that were not previously thought about. The U.S. government, through NASA, has been analyzing the data captured from telescopes to evaluate different areas of the universe. This is scary to some people because they feel the government could use the computers to analyze privacy issues and to spy on people. It will take a visionary in the computer industry to truly utilize the processing power of these computers. As visionaries, we need people to think about capabilities beyond how computers are currently being used and consider how these devices could be used in the future. This is a challenge because most of the industry is extending or adapting the current technology to perform new tasks, not thinking outside the box on what could be possible with the speeds of modern supercomputers.