Reversible computing
December 6, 2006
I’ve been reading “The Singularity Is Near” by Kurzweil. Quite a hefty book! Those of you who’ve read it can probably tell by my title here that I’m only about 20% through the book! Anyway, the idea of ‘reversible computing‘ is pretty intriguing. The core idea, as I got from the book, is that energy is used when bits are erased from the computing cycle (run an instruction on two inputs, return the output, the original two inputs are ‘destroyed’ from memory). Reversible computing suggests that nothing ever be ‘destroyed’ as it were - keep all input and intermediate processing states, that way there’s no energy expended on removing them, hence no/less energy used. It also would allow for someone to ‘go back’ to previous states of the machine because it’s all still there. My first (and only so far) reaction is ‘what about privacy?’ I assume all this would be encrypted indefinitely, but I’m not sure I want someone to be able to replay all my data processing (which involves, by definition, my data). Am I being too paranoid about this?
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