Internet Makes Us Smarter & Stupider!

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

What does a tech-savvy brain look like?
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Will constant access to the Internet make today's young people brilliant multitaskers or shallow, screen-bound hermits? A new opinion poll finds that technology experts believe the answer is "all of the above."

According to a new survey of 1,021 technology experts and critics, hyperconnectivity is a mixed bag. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed agreed that the Internet has wired the under-35 crowd differently, and that this rewiring is a good thing, stimulating multitasking talent and an ability to find relevant information fast online. But 42 percent of experts believe that the hyperconnected brain is shallow, with an unhealthy dependence on the Internet and mobile devices.

"Short attention spans resulting from quick interactions will be detrimental to focusing on the harder problems, and we will probably see a stagnation in many areas: technology, even social venues such as literature," Alvaro Retana, a technologist at HP, responded in the survey. "The people who will strive and lead the charge will be the ones able to disconnect themselves to focus."

Dire predictions

According to the Elon University Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Internet Project, which conducted the survey, the technology expert split is closer to 50-50 on whether the rise of the Internet is a boon or a bane. Many people who responded that Internet-savvy Generation Y is at a mental advantage tempered that opinion with warnings about the dark side of connectedness. [10 Facts About the Teen Brain]

"While they said access to people and information is intensely improved in the mobile Internet age, they added that they are already witnessing deficiencies in younger people's abilities to focus their attention, be patient and think deeply," Janna Anderson, director of Elon's Imagining the Internet Center and a co-author of the report detailing the findings, said in a statement. "Some expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of information, and several mentioned Orwell's '1984.'"

George Orwell's 1949 book described a dystopian society where information was strictly controlled. One respondent who mentioned the book was Paul Gardner-Stephen, a telecommunications fellow at Flinders University.

"[C]entralized powers that can control access to the Internet will be able to significantly control future generations," Gardner-Stephen wrote. "It will be much as in Orwell's '1984', where control was achieved by using language to shape and limit thought, so future regimes may use control of access to the Internet to shape and limit thought."

Online optimism

Many experts praised the talents needed to navigate the Internet, however, and suggested that people who have grown up connected will blossom.

"There is no doubt that brains are being rewired," wrote danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. "The techniques and mechanisms to engage in rapid-fire attention shifting will be extremely useful for the creative class."

Other experts said that the use of the Internet as an "external brain" where facts are stored frees up space for mental processes beyond memorization. [Best Social Networking Sites Online]

"The replacement of memorization by analysis will be the biggest boon to society since the coming of mass literacy in the late 19th to early 20th century," wrote Paul Jones, a new media expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

While there was disagreement about the benefits and costs of an increasingly important Internet, experts were agreed that certain skills and talents would be important for future generations online. Among those were the ability to cooperate to solve problems, also known as crowd-sourcing; the ability to effectively search for information; the ability to synthesize information from many sources; the ability to concentrate; and the ability to filter useful information from the digital "noise" of the Internet.

"There is a palpable concern among these experts that new social and economic divisions will emerge as those who are motivated and well-schooled reap rewards that are not matched by those who fail to master new media and tech literacies," said report co-author Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. "They called for reinvention of public education to teach those skills and help learners avoid some of the obvious pitfalls of a hyperconnected lifestyle.”

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Can The Human Brain See Quantum Images?

Nobody knows whether humans can access exotic images based on quantum entanglement. Now one physicist has designed an experiment to find out

The strange rules of the quantum world lead to many weird phenomena. One of these is the puzzling process of quantum imaging, which allows images to form in hitherto unimagined ways.

Researchers begin by creating entangled pairs by sending a single laser  beam into a non-linear crystal, which converts single photons into entangled pairs of lower frequency photons, a process known as parametric down conversion. A continuous beam generates a series of pairs of entangled photons.

Next, they send the entangled photons towards a pair of detectors. Each member of an entangled pair by itself fluctuates in random ways that make its time and position of arrival uncertain.

Use one of the detectors to receive just one half of the entangled photons and the result is a blur, smeared by the process of randomness.

But use two detectors to receive both sets of photons and the uncertainties disappear, or at least are dramatically reduced. In this case, the 'image' is pinsharp. The uncertainty disappears because of the quantum correlation between the entangled pairs.

Researchers have extended this technique by superimposing a pattern on the wavefront of the initial laser beam, creating shapes such as a donut. They've shown that a single detector alone cannot 'see' a such a donut image even though it appears clean and sharp when two detectors pick up both sets of the entangled pairs.

These strange pictures are called quantum images or higher order images and quantum physicists think they can use them to carry out exotic processes such as sending information secretly and performing quantum lithography.

Today, Geraldo Barbosa at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, raises another interesting possibility. He asks whether it is possible for humans to see higher order images and suggests that a relatively simple experiment could settle the question.

This experiment consists of a laser beam shaped into an image, such as the letter A. This laser then hits a non-linear crystal, generating entangled pairs of photons that retain this image shape. The set up is such that these photons are then detected, not by conventional detectors, but by human eyeballs.

The question is whether the human retina/brain combination can access the correlation that exists between the entangled pairs. If so, the human would see the letter A. If not, he or she would see only a blur.

Of course, there are some significant experimental challenges. One is to design the experiment in a way  that ensures the subject can only receive the image through this quantum process and not through some other channel, such as talking to the experimenter. However, that should be straightforward for any psychologist to design.

Another problem, however, is that the retina can only detect photons in groups of 7 or more and these have to arrive within a specific time window. Only then can a human subject 'see' the result. Generating the required intensity of entangled photons is one challenge.

The key question is whether the entanglement survives this group process. If the brain can access the quantum correlations, the image will be visible. If not, the result will be a blur.

That's a fascinating experiment not least because a positive result would be astounding. It would show that we humans can essentially 'see' entanglement.

Barbosa points out that new forms of imaging are not unknown in the animal world. Various animals and insects see in the infrared and ultraviolet, giving them an entirely different perspective on the world.

There is also some evidence that birds can 'see' the earth's magnetic field thanks to the quantum interaction between the field and light sensitive molecules in their retinas.

So the possibility that new ways of seeing the world can emerge is not unprecedented. However, the idea that humans can access higher order images thanks to quantum entanglement is clearly an idea of a different ilk.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Barbosa's idea is that it appears feasible now. There's no reason why this experiment couldn't be done in any quantum optics lab in the near future.

We'll look forward to seeing the results.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1202.5434: Can humans see beyond intensity images?

TRSF: Read the Best New Science Fiction inspired by today’s emerging technologies.

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IBM Scalable Quantum Computing

IBM Paves The Way Towards Scalable Quantum Computing

Alex Knapp, Forbes Staff

Three superconducting qubits. (Credit: IBM Research)

IBM has announced today that it’s achieved a breakthrough in its work to develop scalable quantum computing by developing a superconducting qubit made from microfabricated silicon that maintains coherence long enough for practical computation.

And now that I’ve thrown a ton of information at you in one tiny sentence, let’s break it all down. I had a chance to talk with IBM scientist Matthias Steffen about this new technology, and he broke it down for me. Let’s start with the qubit. Classical computing, as you probably know, is based on the bit. A bit can exist in one of two possible states, which are typically referred to as “0″ or “1″. A qubit is the equivalent of a bit for quantum computing. It can be in three possible states – “0″ or “1″ or both. The “both” state is known as the superposition. Now, the difference may seem subtle, but mathematically, it’s huge. A few hundred qubits can contain more classical bits of information than the the universe has atoms.

IBM Shrinks Computer Memory Into Only Twelve Atoms
  Alex Knapp Forbes Staff
 
What makes quantum computing challenging is the problem of decoherence. When a qubit is moved from the 0 state to either 1 or the superposition, it will decohere to state 0 due to interference from other parts of the computer. In order for quantum computing to be scalable and practical, the qubits have to be coherent for a long enough time that error-correction techniques can be employed to make sure that the decoherence doesn’t prevent accurate computation.

“In 1999, coherence times were about 1 nanosecond,” Steffen told me. “Last year, coherence times were achieved for as long as 1 to 4 microseconds. With these new techniques, we’ve achieved coherence times of 10 to 100 microseconds. We need to improve that by a factor of 10 to 100 before we’re at the threshold we want to be. But considering that in the past ten years we’ve increased coherence times by a factor of 10,000, I’m not scared.”

 

Alex Knapp Forbes Staff
 MIT's Scott Aaronson Explains Quantum Computing

The IBM team has taken two approaches to quantum computing, both of which factor into the breakthroughs announced here. The first approach is building a 3-D qubit made from superconducting, microfabricated silicon. Steffen notes that the benefit of using silicon for these qubits is that the manufacturing equipment and know-how already exists – new techniques don’t have to be developed. 3-D qubits were pioneered by the Schoelkopf Lab at Yale, and Steffen expressed his admiration for that work. Building on the Yale techniques, the IBM team was able to maintain coherence for 95 microseconds. (“But you could round that to 100 for the piece if you want,” Steffen joked.)

How To Make A Cheaper Quantum Computer
  Alex Knapp Forbes Staff

 The second approach involved a traditional 2-D qubit, which IBM’s scientists used to build a “Controlled NOT gate” or CNOT gate, which is a building block of quantum computing. A CNOT gate connects two qubits such that the second qubit will change state if the first qubit changes its state to 1. For example, if qubit A’s state is changed from 0 to 1, and qubit B’s state is 1, it will flip to state 0. But if qubit A’s state is changed from 1 to 0, qubit B is unaffected. That seems simple enough, but when you scale multiple logic gates like this together, you have a very real basis for computation. The CNOT gates were able to maintain coherence times of 10 microseconds, which is long enough to show a 95% accuracy rate. The previous accuracy record for CNOT gates was 81% accuracy, so this is a huge step.  Of course, Steffen was quick to note that there’s still a ways to go before this can be implemented as a computing solution. That makes common sense, since 95% is accurate, but in the long run you need the accuracy to be as close to 100% as possible. 
 

The Inner Workings of a Quantum von Neumann Computer Alex Knapp Forbes Staff

Given the rapid progress that IBM has made, scalable quantum computing is starting to look like a real possibility. As error-correction protocols improve and coherence times lengthen, accurate quantum computing becomes a real possibility. But don’t expect to have a quantum smartphone anytime soon using this technique. In order to get the results the IBM team has seen in either the 2-D or 3-D configuration, the qubits have to be cooled down to less than a degree above absolute zero.

“There’s a growing sense that a quantum computer can’t be a laptop or desktop,” said Steffen. “Quantum computers may well just being housed in a large building somewhere. It’s not going to be something that’s very portable.  In terms of application, I don’t think that’s a huge detriment because they’ll be able to solve problems so much faster than traditional computers.”

The next steps for the team is to improve coherence and error-correction protocols to the point where the accuracy is over 99.9%. That means they’ll have achieved a “logical qubit” – one that, for practical purposes, doesn’t experience decoherence. From that point, the next step is to develop a quantum computing architecture. IBM is considering some possibilities here, including developing some quantum memory architechture. But what encourages Steffen in these endeavors is that these are questions of engineering, not of theory.

“We are very excited about how the quantum computing field has progressed over the past ten years,” he told me. “Our team has grown significantly over past 3 years, and I look forward to seeing that team continue to grow and take quantum computing to the next level.”

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