The CasioNova Project’s Relationship with Deep Time

Civilisations rise and fall. CasioNova’s civilisation is beginning it’s collapse – perhaps it will be swift, the ascendency was damn fast and short, as far as civilisations go. Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse, as they say.

It is leaving a good looking corpse that is of concern for me – I have been immensely troubled by the shenanigans of our beloved leaders but their behaviour is the behaviour of many beloved leaders in the past, my mind can only get taken off contemporary atrocities by planning for the future. Planning for deep time. Not really that deep, just seven or generations is all I can get my head around.

Our corpse is our knowledge, our information, our records – of which the complete works of David Bowie is but a small part. The legacy our generation will leave, apart from the largest extinction event this planet has seen, a completely altered climate and a (only one word for it) shitload of toxic waste, is the most meticulously documented civilisation to have waxed and waned.

Initially my schtick was ensuring the robustness of this information to last generations and for post industrial peoples to have access to it. Lately it has become apparent that I haven’t been thinking big enough. The way for our records to continue is through distributed computing – that is keeping the worldwide network of computers going. However, I forgot about Moores law. Oops.

Moores law is the fact that the complexity of electronic circuits double every two years. In simple terms computers get twice as powerful. Every year its ‘nah, Moores law aint gonna happen’, yet it does. This is damn interesting – for if Moores law persists we are facing the prospect of EXTREMELY smart machines in the moderately near future.

Many people think that humans will forego their bodies and upload themselves into the machines and become immortal. Perhaps, yet I have a hunch the scenario will be different, as we are very attached to our bodies and our bodies are an integral definition of ourselves.

Damn smart machines – the most likely outcome is sentience (I know it is THE question exactly what that means but hey, this aint a doctoral thesis). An intelligence greater than ours and of quite a different kind, my personal bets are on a sort of hive mind.

It is impossible to predict or comprehend what the next sentient intelligence on our planet will be like, perhaps it is best to ponder what it’s, their, relationship to us will be like. The typical trash sci-fi response is that it will be like a god to us, I think this is fundamentally flawed and we can find relationships that are analogous within our current human experience. Instead of gods, think of dogs.

Woof. Since dogs are the only species that have co-evolved with us, and they are a species with a smaller brain, I am finding our relationship with dogs to be the only way my own puny brain can comprehend our likely future. Except next time around we are the dogs. Which isn’t a bad thought – dogs seem pretty happy.

I know what you’re thinking, isn’t the imminent global economic collapse going to put a halt to electronic research and development and therefore Moore’s law aint gonna be what it used to be? Possibly, but I doubt it because computer power is more than the nuts and bolts of the machines – it is also the software AND it is the networking of computers. Moores law only takes into account the complexity of individual circuits.
Software at the moment is quite clunky, due to it not being in corporations interest to pay programmers to spend a lot time making their code as fast and as efficient as possible. The open source movement in recent years has shown that software development can be in order of magnitudes faster if the code isn’t kept secret.

This is the first stage – making computer code freely available, the next stage is code that writes code. In a post industrial world it will not be machines building machines but software writing software, this in conjunction with the vast power of distributed computing (imagine if every computer connected to the internet was dedicated to solving one equation) is how the next sentient intelligence will emerge.

If this scares the pants off you, it did initially for me but then again I have very short shorts, till I realised that human beings, well we suck. Currently we are committing what some term omnicide, killing everything. Throughout history we have proven to be a terribly destructive species. So as far as Artificial Intelligence goes, I think we have set a pretty high standard of evil and it will be unlikely a self aware machine would be able to even come close to our capacity of brutality.

More thoughts later…
Current Music: Falco – Rock Me Amadaus