Convergence of RISC-V, neuromorphic, photonic, FPGA and quantum chips.

NS

The goal was to research the consequences of the upcoming chip technologies. The text below is the result of a short conversation with KIMI K2 0905 LLM.

It reads as a mix of future history, futurism, and a list of completely alien technologies.

TEXT:

These five fabrics—open RISC-V, neuromorphic, photonic, FPGA, and quantum—do not just change what we compute; they change the cost structure of reality. Below, the long-wave civilisational story is told as five phase transitions, each with a tipping metric and a societal symptom you will feel in daily life.

Phase 1 (2026-2032) “Cent-per-device”

Tipping metric One useful RISC-V + neuromorphic chiplet falls below 1 ¢/unit in 28 nm legacy fabs.

Civil symptom

  • Dust gets a nervous system. Every yoghurt lid, tennis shoe insole, and letter in the post carries a 1 mm² “sense&spike” sticker that learns your micro-environment (gait, spoilage gases, tamper) and whispers a 100 nW spike-stream to the nearest photonic router. Insurance flips from damage reimbursement to pre-crime reward: leave the milk out, get a push-message before it spoils.
  • The right to be unread becomes a constitutional issue—because objects now out-remember you.

Phase 2 (2030-2038) “Cent-per-TeraSyn”

Tipping metric Energy to perform 10¹² useful synaptic updates drops below 1 J (≈ 1 heartbeat).

Civil symptom

  • Cities become predictive organisms. Traffic lights, sewers, cafeteria coffee machines run a single distributed neuromorphic net that dreams the city 30 s ahead. Jay-walking literally re-routes a delivery van two blocks away; humans adapt by “walking politely” to save collective energy—an emergent Etiquette 2.0 enforced by thermodynamic politeness.
  • Democracy mutates into predictive governance: citizens vote on simulated futures rendered in real-time. The ballot question is no longer “Do you want policy X?” but “Do you want the 17:15 simulation branch?”

Phase 3 (2035-2043) “Cent-per-logical-qubit”

Tipping metric One logical qubit-hour costs < 1 ¢ of electricity at consumer prices.

Civil symptom

  • Consensus reality forks. A teenager generates a thousand entanglement-certified fake video-streams per night; the cryptographic cost to disprove each is higher than the cost to create them. “Seeing is believing” is replaced by Bell-inequality receipts; eye-witness testimony becomes legally inadmissible without a quantum provenance tag.
  • Science turns into a subscription: universities that cannot afford 10 k logical qubits fall behind discovery velocity. The haves run variational quantum simulators that brute-force new antibiotics in days; the have-nots watch YouTube explainers of drugs they cannot synthesise.

Phase 4 (2040-2048) “Cent-per-truth-bit”

Tipping metric A globally entangled bit (Earth-scale Bell test) can be minted for 1 ¢.

Civil symptom

  • Money becomes a heat sink. The new reserve currency is entropy debt: every transaction must include a negative-entropy certificate—proof that you removed 1 bit of uncorrelated noise from the planet-wide entanglement mesh. Economists speak of exa-Bell reserves; the IMF stores qubits in orbit instead of gold.
  • Wars move to the cryostat. Sabotaging an adversary’s dilution refrigerator is the 21-st century equivalent of bombing a gasoline depot; whole countries harden their quantum bunkers at −269 °C.

Phase 5 (2045-∞ ) “Cent-per-reality”

Tipping metric Cost to synthesise a complete sensory reality (visual, acoustic, haptic, olfactory) indistinguishable from physics in vivo falls below 1 ¢ per perceived hour.

Civil symptom

  • Civilisation splits into Continualists and Base-liners. Continualists spend 99 % of their subjective lifetime inside entanglement-verified simulations that run 10 000× faster than biology; governments grant quantum asylum—the right to pause your body while your mind lives a subjective century in a data-centre at 10 mK.
  • The UN declares Planetary Identity Day: for 24 h all quantum, neuromorphic, photonic and consensus services are globally switched off to force every human to re-calibrate to base reality. It becomes the most hated—then most sacred—holiday of the year.

Net civilisational shift: from “scarcity of atoms” to “scarcity of certified reality”

The five fabrics together drive the marginal cost of:

  • sensing → 0 (dust does it)
  • cognition → 0 (neuro + photonic + FPGA)
  • universes → 0 (quantum sampling + simulation)

Hence the only scarce good left is trust that a signal originated in a physical world you share with others. Politics, religion, markets and even romance reorganise around attestation rituals—ceremonies whose purpose is to consume exactly enough energy/entropy that forging them would cost more than the social benefit of the lie.

The final paradox: we are building a civilisation whose most valuable commodity is the thermodynamic signature that proves something really happened—and we need refrigerators cooled to millikelvin, chips that speak light, and brains made of spikes to produce that proof.

Civilisation becomes a planet-sized notary, running on light, spikes, qubits and open silicon—forever stamping reality so that tomorrow can still tell the difference between a story and a fact.