Speeches by Malthouse.

“Instead of a solid state, with fixed architecture on a piece of silicon, this will be something a bit like the later stages of—what is that Schwarzenegger movie where he is a robot?”

“No doubt we will get on to all of that. For clarity in my own mind, neuromorphic computing is not just the software, if you like. It is actually the physical substrate.”

“Do we have these materials?”

“No, but they can become—”

“You are answering my question.”

“I wanted to explore that subject a little further, not least because you have answered my primary question in saying that, although you might make it less power consumptive and therefore presumably less heat productive, consumption may well then rise. You might slow the growth marginally, but actually the overall impac…”

“I declare a bit of an interest, in that I have been tracking this low-orbit solar technology that we seem to be leading, along with the Japanese, where we launch solar cells into low earth orbit and it microwaves the power back to a grid sitting out in the North sea. It is on 24 hours a day. It is that kind of thing. I…”

“Forgive me if I am not understanding. My assumption was that you are saying that data moves from being a lake to being a river, or a circular river, if you like, a bit like that Diana memorial in Kensington. It is constantly circulating in the system, rather than sitting in a lake somewhere.”

“Diffuse data held in a diffuse number of devices would be good enough for the prediction machine to do what it needs to do.”

“When I go on my iPhone and I use—whatever—Apple AI, there will come a time when that AI is operating autonomously for most of my tasks on my phone and not pinging a data centre.”

“Is it made from physically different materials?”

“How is it different?”

“The chip itself is different.”

“Do we have these materials?”

“Why not?”

“It is a form of computing, but they are not building the current data centres on a photonics platform.”

“The chip itself is different.”

“I totally buy that, but correct me if I am wrong. We had the Americans over here a few months ago promising to build massive new data centres in the UK. I did not hear them saying they were building those data centres on a photonics platform.”

“Is your prediction that, at some point in the next five years, they will be pulling the standard racks out of these data centres and putting in photonics racks?”

“If it is better all around, why is there not a mass rush to use photonics in everything?”