Historian of science George Dyson at Edge.org, January 1, 2019:
Nations, alliances of nations, and national institutions are in decline, while a state perhaps best described as Oligarchia is on the ascent. George Dyson explains in this, the first Edge New Year's Essay.
"To ring in the New Year in the most depressing and hope-crushing way possible, Dyson sat down with Edge.org” — Brett Tingley, Mysterious Universe
Childhood's End
All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail.
The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were
supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these
instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.
Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans
providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable
appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines
began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made
by those who had a hand in this. A small number of people and companies
who helped spawn self-replicating codes became some of the richest and
most powerful individuals and organizations in the world.
Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is
increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel.
Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are
following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the
other way around. The digital revolution has come full circle and the
next revolution, an analog revolution, has begun. None dare speak its
name.
Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece,
published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who
bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the
Internet to Earth. It does not end well.
To
those seeking true intelligence, autonomy, and control among machines,
the domain of analog computing, not digital computing, is the place to
look.
The digital revolution progressed through five stages:
the repurposing of war-surplus analog vacuum tube components into the
first generation of fully-electronic stored-program computers; the era
of large central mainframes; the era of the microprocessor and personal
computer; the advent of the Internet; and finally the era of
fully-metazoan codes that populate the mobile landscape of today. The
next revolution is the assembly of digital components into analog
computers, similar to the way analog components were assembled into
digital computers in the aftermath of World War II.
Nature uses digital coding for the storage, replication,
recombination, and error correction of sequences of nucleotides, but
relies on analog coding and analog computing for intelligence and
control. No programming, no code. To those seeking true intelligence,
autonomy, and control among machines, the domain of analog computing,
not digital computing, is the place to look.
Digital computers deal with integers, binary sequences, deterministic
logic, algorithms, and time that is idealized into discrete increments.
Analog computers deal with real numbers, non-deterministic logic, and
continuous functions, including time as it exists as a continuum in the
real world. In analog computing, complexity resides in topology, not
code. Information is processed as continuous functions of values such as
voltage and relative pulse frequency rather than by logical operations
on discrete strings of bits.
Digital computing, intolerant of error or
ambiguity, depends upon precise definitions and error correction at
every step. Analog computing not only tolerates errors and ambiguities,
but thrives on them. Digital computers, in a technical sense, are analog
computers, so hardened against noise that they have lost their immunity
to it. Analog computers embrace noise; a real-world neural network needing a certain level of noise to work.
Electronics underwent two fundamental transitions over the past 100
years: from analog to digital and from vacuum tubes to solid state. That
these transitions occurred together does not imply a necessary link.
Just as digital computation was first implemented using vacuum tube
components, analog computation can be implemented in solid state. Analog
computation is alive and well despite vacuum tubes being commercially
extinct.
The spectacular success of digital computers in modeling real-world
phenomena, encoded as algorithms with the results used as output to
control something in the real world, has outshadowed very different ways
that digital computers, and networks of digital computers, can be used.
Algorithms and digital simulations have become so embedded in our
culture and world view that we find it almost impossible to recognize
that other forms of computation, without algorithms or digital models,
effectively control much of the world.
We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human
knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company
(or maybe it’s the same company) builds a model of road traffic and
allows us to access that model, or that yet another company builds a
model of the social graph and allows us to join that model — for a price
we are not quite told. This fits our preconceptions that an army of
programmers is still in control somewhere but it is no longer the way
the world now works.
The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the
enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way
through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models
are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human
knowledge, it
is human knowledge....
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