Week 13 Reading Response

In Stross’s “How low power can you go”, it predicts that with the development of technology, “” Stross in his article talks about that how the society can make good use of low power microprocessors, likely, the high-tech chips. Stross calculates in his article, and concludes that by around 2030, it should be possible to exhaustively sequence a personal genome for under a cent. The equipment to do so will be cheap and effectively solid-state. Monitoring the city’s corner and making a database for collecting information from the whole city, or as Stross calls it , a “city genome” , is not a tough task anymore.

“A city does not consist solely of human beings. A myriad of macroscopic and microscopic organisms coexist with us.”

Utilizing of these low-cost chips and collective data can definitely help the society to improve society in different fields: transportation, medical and clinical systems, education, entertainment, etc. With ten cent processors that Stross talked about, these chips can be used in Climatology and meteorology, local monitoring, and traffic control. There is an interesting example in his article that people waste food because people cannot inspect every plant. This example could be applied to human beings as well: the society is wasting human labor resource because the governor cannot inspect each person, but AI can. It’s reasonable that AI is able to reform social structures and help to guide resource allocation in a way that government cannot.  Actually,  AI has been used to create predictive models to help government agencies more effectively use their limited budgets to address problems. This doesn’t mean that AI, as city governor is superior than human governments, but with targeted incentives and funding priorities, AI technologies is beneficial for building low-cost and efficient community.

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