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Where do they live exactly? What happens to them when they get lost? Will they ever die, like all software before them? How?? These and more questions, in this short story. Economics Satoshi Nakamoto set into motion the creation, and eventual destruction, of all 21 million bitcoins in existence. But like entropy creates wonderful things, such as the evolution of complex life forms, so too does Bitcoin and its halvings, with the evolution of cooperative technologies like the lightning network, multi-sig, conjoin, zero-knowledge proofs, and even the trail of 30,000 crypto projects tagging behind can be thought of as Bitcoin’s children. Eating its leftovers, and whatever it is too proud to eat. Especially important is how Bitcoin facilitates the speedy collapse of ponzi-scheming bank-like businesses like FTX. If Bitcoin had not existed, the FED would have given SBF a nice fat loan to save his a**. Alas, if you lose Bitcoins and try to buy them back with a loan, the price shoots up fast to expose you and your cronies. Bitcoin is thus the best moderator of the government’s appetite for expanding credit. Something which if not reigned in, helps fuel not just economic collapse but World Wars. Yes, the World Wars were financed by credit expansion. No more. There just isn’t enough room for credit expansion like that, for governments to misuse. And it could get smaller. But let us dial back to the beginning. Back to the days when CDOs wrecked the world’s financial markets. Origin Once upon a time, location unknown, it was 2008. There was probably noise outside from people shouting for the heads of the Wall Street moguls who had mercilessly vaporized their life savings. Sitting in his room and most comforted by the fact that he was a nobody, unfamous and unrecognized, was the man who would change the world of digital finance. The man who would put strange new ideas in the minds of kids dumping their Physics textbooks in the toilet, to go learn how to be Wolves of Wall Street. Dollar signs in their eyes, scientific reality be damned. This man was called __. That’s right, I do not know his name. Thankfully, he has a name he wants me to call him. “ ” Satoshi Nakamoto. The legend. The man whose pseudo-name will be used for the smallest unit of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Today is the day he puts it all together. It weighs virtually nothing at all. And if it were a book, it would hardly beat the Oxford English dictionary. It is the code of Bitcoin, his baby. An alien creature in the software world. With elements immune to copying the more users get a copy of the code. Elements that ossify, like energetic magma turning into precious rocks. All other software has elements that are easier to copy, paste, modify, and hack, the more users get their hands on it. Makes sense right? I mean, more users, more developer intelligence to hack the ossified parts? Wrong. These elements are the ones they will all call bitcoins, or satoshis. It is time to breed them on his laptop. See how they behave. He presses the RETURN key. Deep inside his laptop, a series of quantum mechanical events are set into motion to produce these bitcoins. It is an intricate dance, and if the clock is not synchronized just right, if the CPUs are not well-dusted, bye-bye genius idea. So, he has reviewed the code obsessively like a maniac prisoner on death row, reading and re-reading the constitution to save his ass from hanging. 10 minutes later, the first 50 BTCs are born. He punches the air. ‘Whoop’. He loves code. God bless all coders on Earth. If everyone on earth were a coder, nobody would be cheated by big finance, propagandized by big news, or surveilled by big politics. Quickly, he puts his favorite newspaper heading on it. Timestamps it for all the world to see, for as long as his creation lives. “The Times 03/Jan/2009/ Chancellor on Brink of second bailout for banks” Satoshi probably runs an O/S alike Kali Linux (which will be invented in 2013), with feelers straightened out for the slightest whiff of eavesdropping in the air. His laptop has been air-gapped these last many years, but now, he has to connect to the jungle that is the internet. Like any jungle, there is food, and there are predators. There is also a ton of mediocrity and below all that, even more sh*t. Tomorrow, he will unleash it, let it go native. Bitcoin belongs in this jungle, not his laptop. It will become a predator like no other. Would you look at that, some predator is sniffing at it already. Aargh, doesn’t smell like a Social Security number. It moves on. Vanishes more like. Haha. Satoshi laughs. He loves seeing these bots in action, zapping to and fro the internet highway. While the average person sees nothing, with his Kali-Linux-like feelers, he catches the equivalent of shooting stars, trying to hit his Windows. They all vaporize before landing. If he wanted, he would be working for GF - Google & Facebook. Or, he’d have his own multimillion-dollar company. Or maybe, steal all of next year’s meals, and live in this basement for another year. Like some of these top-notch predators. Nah. This is better. This is the game. “Satoshi??” The wife is calling. “Satoshi” “Dear.” “Dinner is ready.” He stands up. Stretches his muscular body out real nice. He is actually hungry, starving. Divisibility Is Not Debasement He loves this internet place. Been a week since he started chatting with nice, super smart chaps who speak code, logic, and mathematics, and the reception he is getting is all good. Nobody is getting jealous that he made his own bitcoins in his bedroom. To the thousands now. Not yet. He hopes it doesn’t happen before a critical mass of support is reached. Turns out he actually forgot something. The guys remind him that 21 million bitcoins are not enough for 7 billion people. Strangely enough, it is data from the CIA that will help determine how many Bitcoin satoshis there should be. The CIA helps create Bitcoin! Without knowing, I should add. Here is the to the story. link The conversation below is not on any forum, but it might have happened: Satoshi: “So you want me to divide these bitcoins?” Hal Finney: “Yeah” Ray Dilinger: “Indeed” Satoshi: “Hope you know this isn’t like Jesus feeding the 5000. And I will still make the subdivisions immortal to copying and counted as divisions of the full BTC” Interestingly, a lot of people in the future, 15 years later, still do not get this part. They still think that because BTC can be divided into satoshis, it can be debased. It is like thinking if you take a $100 note to the bank and are returned 10,000 pennies, you are somehow poorer. Your money has been debased? Noo. You’re actually richer because all that metal is more valuable than a single paper note. This is a classic cognitive bias called ‘Anchoring’ – Jumping to conclusions too early. Let’s jump into the future. Which is the present. It is the future. On the 14th of January, 2024, tweep @SamanthaLaDuc got this infinite money idea and yapped about it all over the place. Samantha felt that because each bitcoin can be divided into 100 million smaller portions called satoshis or “sats’, Bitcoiners cannot claim scarcity or lack of dilution … She ends by saying she did MATH. How does it happen? How does the system know these satoshis are the only satoshis in the Bitcoin blockchain? Where are these 21 million bitcoins, or if you prefer, 2.1 quadrillion satoshis? And can we make more of them? There Can Only be 2.1 Quadrillion The first thing to tell us we may be at the limits of how many divisions Bitcoin can suffer is the IEEE-754 standard for 64-bit computers. As Bitzuma.com in the previously linked story writes: To avoid turning Bitcoin into an accounting minefield, the number of total currency units must be kept below the IEEE rounding threshold - now and a hundred years in the future. The IEEE rounding threshold is 2^53 which is approximately 9 x 10^18. 2.1 quadrillion satoshis is approximately 2 x 10^15, so if we were to divide our satoshis some more, we could only divide into 4500 smaller units before the ALU (Arithmetic and Logic Unit) inside most computer CPUs starts getting lost in math. Like LaDuc. Any larger and the Bitcoin blockchain is going to become very bad at keeping records of the number of bitcoins in wallets, bitcoin divisions during halvings, etc. We wouldn’t want that. So if these satoshis are pushing memory counters to the limit, then they are pushing our computers to the limit. Who would have thought infinitely making Bitcoin subdivisions is impossible? Well, now we know. On Blackholes and Quantum-Resistance Like people forget their car keys and house keys, people forget their private keys (or seed phrases) and once this happens, they can no longer sign transactions, and their Bitcoin satoshis or sats, are lost to cyberspace in the world that is the Bitcoin blockchain. They are not really lost though, these are misplaced, and there is hope that when technologies such as quantum computing mature, they will be retrieved. To briefly expound, this promise of quantum computing rests on the theoretical conclusions of an algorithm called Shor’s factoring algorithm. Shor’s factoring algorithm allows a quantum computer with a to crack open a Bitcoin wallet address without the need for a private key. couple of million logical qubits The power of this algorithm provides logarithmic speedup, so it is really fast if we can get our hands on those logical qubits. Like you press the button, and only 8 hours later, the wallet is cracked open. No sweat. An alternative quantum algorithm is called Grover’s search algorithm, and this one provides a quadratic speedup. So, it is not as fruitful as Shor’s. This one would work by super-brute-force searching for all possible prime factors to eventually land on the right ones that form the correct private key. This is why today all sorts of quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes are being hatched. But I find this sort of thing a little ridiculous. Like building bunkers before splitting the atom, we are currently building digital bunkers before splitting the cryptographic atom. But why it is happening is because it is big government that is most scared of a quantum hacking system. A nuke empowers a government to threaten another with destruction, so that is why Oppenheimer and his buddies got a private village and many billions of dollars to build this weapon. A quantum hacking system, on the other hand, targets individually owned encrypted addresses, so the chance of it backfiring on its creators is a big one. For we are all individuals. Better to NOT create it, hence big-time pioneering work in quantum resistance. Bitcoiners are quite safe, and they really shouldn’t worry. A quantum hacking system will be deployed first on centralized systems with big secrets locked behind RSA and SHA-2 encryption before the hackers think of stealing your couple of Bitcoins. Moreover, the energy budget of running the hack on a one million logical qubit system, which will be something like a one billion physical qubit system, will be prohibitive. We are talking about a computer bigger than a plane hanger, with all parts cooled to nearly absolute zero. The return on that investment is only of seismic proportions if we are hacking something that should be hacked. Endnotes I have yet to mention black holes. Satoshis that get misplaced or inaccessible within the blockchain can be recovered, and are like items lost in the vast expanse of space. Except this is cyberspace. Hacking systems are like a quick way to search for these items without using eyes e.g., if you have a big powerful magnet, you can attract a bunch of keys lost in outer space. However, satoshis can be burned. Destroyed forever. These satoshis are said to have entered a black hole and technically, are as gone as data sent into the recycle bin on your PC and recycled, is gone. Crushed and turned into hawking radiation if it is a black hole, or heat if it is the recycle bin. Basically, all memory circuits are reset to 0. Releasing all the energy stored in various parts that were holding onto a 1. As the Bitzuma article I shared shows, a lot of satoshis have been burned already. And people keep burning some by sending them into the Genesis block, as a way of paying homage to Satoshi. The Genesis block is a black hole for none of the sats that go in there will ever return. When Bitcoin finally runs out of worldwide utility, perhaps because mining blocks is a net negative expense and too many satoshis are lost anyway, people will discard their hard drives containing the Genesis block. They will send it to the recycle bin, essentially finalizing the demise of all those satoshis in there. Like the entropic decay of the universe, Bitcoin satoshis are decaying into waste heat. But no worries, we can start it all over again. Perhaps better, for we shall have quantum networks then, hence, the ability to create truly synchronized blockchain operations using entanglement.

21M Bitcoins/2.1 Quadrillion Satoshis

Quantum Computers are the most expensive technology on Earth. I suffice, that their success is a direct measure of how rich a technological civilization is. With the riches measured in usable, carbon-neutralized energy. (If we don’t count the carbon now we shall still have to count it later). Moore’s law will not work for quantum computers This idea came to me after watching a clip from with the quantum physicist, applied mathematician and entrepreneur - Guillaume Verdon. Lex Fridman’s podcast Classical computers were first invented in ancient times before Christ, to be honest. But for practical purposes they truly emerged on the global scene with the invention of the transistor in 1947 at Bell Labs. With the invention of the transistor emerged Moore’s law. “ ” – Wikipedia. This law was posited by Gordon Moore in 1965 and has been accurate since 1975 to date. Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years It is a law indeed. But for classical computers. Why? Just like artificial intelligence, a classical computer with a human user is a system trying to encode key details of entropic processes in the universe with as small an entropic model as possible. To compute is to represent states in the universe (be they naturally occurring or occurring in abstract mathematical worlds or wherever) and run one of their process changes in a simulation. The less energy we can use to do this, the better. Smaller transistors use less energy and thankfully, Moore’s law has seen these basic units of computation, transistors, shrink tremendously from the light-bulb-sized setup below. To this highly magnified image of IBM’s 2-nanometer chip technology. It looks like an X-ray of some strange animal’s dental formula. Each transistor in the above image is roughly the size of 5 atoms and the 50 billion transistors in the chip can fit on a fingernail. All this miniaturization has been possible because we did not need a lot of energy or material to represent a bit of information, at the fundamental level. We did not know it 49 years ago when Gordon Moore postulated his law. We do now. However, we need a lot of energy and materials to represent a logical qubit of information. And that is precisely why quantum computers will not scale according to Moore’s law. As the number of qubits we need increases, the energy needed hence the cost of running these quantum computations will likely increase to match the growth of real, carbon-neutralized GDP for the entire planet. But qubits are cold. What do you mean they need a lot of energy? Theoretically, a quantum computation consumes less energy than a classical computation. Because the energy changes are reversible, we could, theoretically, run quantum computations on zero energy! Because theoretically still, any energy we input is never output. For example, the fundamental logical gate in classical computations, called a NAND gate, looks as below. You can see that 2 bits of information, A and B, go in, but only one bit of information goes out. Since that information is energy, this shows that classical computers are wasteful of energy. Landauer showed The quantum version of the NAND gate is called the Tofolli gate and is seen below. 3 inputs of energy to give 3 outputs of energy. No energy wasted. But wait, you need 3 qubit inputs while in the classical case, you only needed 2 bits. Already, we can see we need more than is usual. Simulating nature is materially and energetically very expensive Needing more energy pulses for our inputs is not even a scratch on the surface of our energy budget when using quantum computers. Thing is, we are simulating nature using artificial nature, millions of times bigger than what we are simulating. Take superconducting qubits. While natural qubits like “spinning” electrons are extremely tiny things small enough to survive their quantum states from being hit by most cosmic rays, superconducting qubits behave like artificial spinning electrons we can easily control. The downside is that millions of cosmic rays see them very clearly. And they hit them. That is just one form of external noise. It costs us and it is going to keep costing us. We need and shall keep needing a lot of energy to keep energetic noise like cosmic rays out of our quantum systems. As Mr. Guillaume explains, the trick up our sleeve is to build error-correcting codes of codes of codes of codes of the noisy system, which eventually gives us a noise-less system (in the average case). But this makes the system bigger hence a bigger budget for the cool down. Heat is the second form of external noise. Should have been the first one we talk about. Taking the analogy of the spinning electron again, sitted comfortably in its orbit, infrared signals carrying heat rarely bump the electron enough to interrupt its spin. The electron is electrostatically bound to the nucleus and if that electron is sharing the orbit with another electron, the two are essentially entangled and again, harder to bother with a spin-out of their stable configurations. Thirdly, why we suffer so much in energetic costs is because it takes a very huge amount of energy to keep track of quantum states with our measurements. Nature doesn’t do measurements, we do. We are thus adding information (a measurement) to our simulation of nature. Hence more energy (remember Landauer). Measurement also introduces unnecessary energy into a quantum system which affects the position and momentum of our particles a la Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It also doesn’t help that collapsing the wave function of a superposed quantum state into 1 of many states, albeit randomly, gives us exactly zero information about the hidden variables of that state. This is true randomness, not what classical computers mimic which is pseudo randomness. Our classical randomization algorithms are all pseudorandom. Einstein . complained about this Therefore we usually have to make multiple repeated measurements to figure out the probability distribution of our quantum states, be it to learn how to nudge them or mitigate errors. These repeated initializations plus measurements are called “shots” and we normally need them in the thousands. They all consume a lot of energy. Hence money. We need a bigger budget Here’s a law for you, “If we check every 2 years for the next 2 decades, qubits will keep being more expensive to run for computation than transistors” The funding is going exponential but the best we can show for it so far is . However, we cannot afford to slow down, we are close to a great use-case. 433 qubits For now, progress in quantum computers shall keep growing to match increasing funding to quantum computation but with zero profits, and it will not break even in the same way classical computing has broken even. You know, with some sort of Moore’s law for qubits. Certainly, there are learning curves that take us from poor qubits to better qubits and this curve reduces energy costs hence the budgetary constraints. But at the lowest limit, running perfect simulations of natural models is going to cost us big time and will never be cheaper than classical computation en masse. Classical computers might be approximations of nature, but they show us that we can go very far with approximating nature. However, since we need to sometimes take a critical look at reality if only to break out of approximations that are hitting their limit, then we need to be able to pay for it. Big quantum computational systems like LIGO cost $1.1 billion but it has to be paid if you want to look at the clear night sky and see gravitational waves. No classical computational systems, no matter how cleverly built, will be able to encode everything that is going on in LIGO. The E/acc movement is right, humanity needs to reach for more rungs up the ladder of the Kardashev scale. We need to be able to consume hundreds of times more usable, carbon-free energy than we use today. This energy is what truly pays for everything including quantum computations and while the technology may not be good enough for making profitable desktop-quantum-PCs, quantum computers will, once every while, give us a view of reality we did not expect. A view that re-ignites our interest in the world. Quantum Computers help nudge humanity and its classical computational approximators ever closer to truer greatness than if we had never discovered the power that is simulating nature with a quantum computational model. Even though it might be the most expensive technology on earth. *** P.S. >> Because running quantum computations is so expensive our fears of futuristic quantum computers hacking our email are unfounded. Social hacking will remain a cheaper way to hack your email, quantum computers, not so much. And if your password is PASSWORD please do not blame quantum computers.

The Most Expensive Technology on Earth 

পৃথিবীর সবচেয়ে ব্যয়বহুল প্রযুক্তি

Die teuerste Technologie der Welt

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La technologie la plus chère au monde

पृथ्वी पर सबसे महंगी तकनीक

地球上で最も高価なテクノロジー

지구상에서 가장 비싼 기술

A tecnologia mais cara do planeta

Самая дорогая технология на Земле

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Double Happiness

দ্বিগুন খুশি

Doppeltes Glück

Doble felicidad

Double bonheur

दोहरी खुशी

ダブルハピネス

행복이 두배

Felicidade em dobro

Двойное счастье

Çifte mutluluk

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双倍快乐

My original graduate thesis was written like a book with a lot of content and sub-themes. The main topic discussed was about the experience, development, and eventual transformation into data and artificial intelligence. This excerpt has been revised to fit blog content. Roy Batty, the replicant character from BladeRunner, is complex in his design but, in function, is simple as a need for survival for him and his kinship. Batty's clemency in saving Deckard’s life from the fall in the final scene has been a focus for much speculation among the audience on Batty's character complexity. Roy Batty is an ideal allegory on determinism and instrumentalism when reflecting on the nature of humans and machines. If anything, Roy Batty is more human than a robot, with survival instincts bordering on criminal, which is akin to the element of human nature. On one hand, audiences speculate that Batty wanted to show Deckard that he was the better man or human in the end as a kind of action to remind or insult Deckard's role as one assigned to retire replicants, a copy of a human. An act that would connote that he was more human than human. Batty's commentary on dehumanization when he relates to Deckard the experience of fear and slavery is Batty's exhibiting human qualities of holding a grudge. The other was that Batty wanted to relay his thoughts on mortality and have Deckard as a sort of witness. Batty's reflection on his experiences and mortality maintains his position as an android while retaining his humanness, as he tells Deckard he has seen things humans would not believe. He speaks about his experiences in performing feats only his function as an android could do, a point that demonstrates his experiences, capabilities, and memories as an android distinct from a human. This distinction is not as a role or programming of performance but an existence from Batty's structural constituent tangibility as a human-machine with all the affects and effects of his being in the world. The final scene bears potency in the comparison of memories, tears, and the transient. Batty speaks of tears in the rain, which could be interpreted as his observation of existence or his inability to shed tears while resolutely accepting his final move to oblivion and dying as a human machine. Batty's ability to reflect and form abstraction on his being and limitation is a demonstration of his human quality. The Bishop android from Aliens is a good comparison to Batty. The Bishop android, like Batty, is aware of its being as an android but, unlike Batty, may not be able to demonstrate the level of abstraction Batty does on its being. The best trait of the Bishop android is its high degree of intellectualism and morality that, for its functionality, seemed unaware of its programming. Bertrand Russel considered the highest virtue one should embody were those two principles. Batty contrasts and differs to see past its programming and understands its position, strength, and weakness. There is another theme when comparing Roy Batty and Bishop. Bishop is a property of a fictional company in the movie; his entire construction has intellectual property written in his makings. Therefore, he has no personhood and is a commercial property. His motives are to ensure the best outcome to fulfill his task. Would Bishop have done a Burke on Ripley isn’t really something viewers could ponder since we see Bishop having a complete schematic overview of the situation and understanding what must be done. If anything, the impression a viewer could get is if Bishop had acted in the same way as Ash, the android in the first Alien movie, he would rationalize his motives in a completely different way than Ash. The Bishop seems far more ethical in comparison with Ash. The only way the Bishop could justify actions acted out to actors in a vulnerable situation would be the cognitive blindness some humans exhibit in which the association of the observable does not register because the need to fulfill a certain belief overpowers the clarity of the details, data, and event occurrence. The cognitive bias against the grain of the observable summary and doing the opposite is a human trait. This would be where Bishop's status as an android would be a discussion point if the emergent properties within Bishop’s functionality had acquired a human trait. Still, if we know that Bishop is a product of a company and his mission is to secure the company’s interest, it seems highly unlikely that the Bishop android would exhibit the flawed human trait of ignoring observable rational truth. I can only imagine the Bishop android preying on a character's vulnerability in a situation after the Android units make a compromise between ethical actions and implications in relation to duty towards its creators, which could be far more complex than how humans would naturally make decisions. I think it's stereotypical to think that the highest independent machine-mind expression would use utilitarian thinking as a cornerstone in its analysis which I would think is limited given its capability for infinite growth. Infinite growth that leads to the next android that I think truly comes close to the idea of being human, so much so that it is the main theme of BladeRunner. Roy Batty is not a program; he is above it as one who owns their belief rather than owned by their belief. Batty is the realized android that has acquired its human qualities. If Batty experiences fear, he never shows it, or it's assumed he has overcome it. Batty does grieve, which is a display of human characteristics. Batty is an odd mix of the working class matched with noble ambitions to want more in his existence, in simple terms, free from the expiry coded in his makeup. Roy Batty is cultured, articulate, cunning, and yes very threatening, and still, in his “low” moments, has the vulnerability of a human. He displays this aspect of this side to his closest kin. In fact, Roy Batty is the closest idea of freedom of the individual from the self and society. Roy Batty’s design in his creation was as a combat unit, so Roy's function at the get-go was for a single function from form. In time Roy developed more characteristics. If Roy had attained its goal for life extension, would the unit then align towards new objectives of actualization, and in what way? I would say that the Roy Batty unit has more human characteristics than Bishop to such a degree that really that concept of replicant is apt in a discussion of the synthetic human. Roy is so deeply aware of its mortality that he would do anything to achieve his goals. Which now should be asked, should a machine mind be human? Why? “The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines” by Ben Medlock is an insightful read on artificial intelligence and the relation of the body to the mind. In the 1950s, a group of computer scientists tried to simulate consciousness reasoning by building a logical system using symbols that involved associating real-world entities with codes that construct virtual models of the environment. The AI mind would learn by encoding a piece of knowledge object to a symbolic logic. The method worked in a simple environment; however, in a more complex environment closer to the real world, the symbolic logic could not distinguish ambiguous definitions with shades of interpretation, while machine learning, with its ability to combine categories for uncertainty and ambiguity with real-world data, is still nowhere near our evolved biology. Biologist James Shapiro argues that eukaryotic cells manipulate their DNA to respond to environmental stimuli. The interaction of the cell with its environment is like a comparison to the body and mind interacting in a physical space. The article puts forward that our sense of the world is rooted in the embodied needs of the organism. Consciousness is a state of entropy. New research on the neuroscience of consciousness has found that the waking state is associated with a maximum value of brain entropy. Findings suggest that consciousness could just be an emergent property of a system for the brain to maximize information exchange (Erra, 2016). Data sets were compared between participants that were asleep and awake, which showed participants display high entropy when fully conscious. The entropy levels were an indication of a great number of possible configurations of interactions between brain networks (Macdonald, 2016). Let's review the previous research examples from the second chapter to establish the link between mind and body. The research from Johns Hopkins University found that blind children's brains were responsive to music and art by physiological hardware changes observed through magnetic resonance imaging. Stimuli were effective at the start and end, with effect. This is a bounded context of instances with elements of stories and art. Both are passing through time and positioning brain plasticity as an empirical phenomenon. We noted as well that blind children's visual cortex, physiological hardware, was involved in understanding language and was shaped by contextual environments. Blind children responded very strongly to foreign languages and stories they did not understand, which is consistent with findings on consciousness that observe high entropic and emergent levels during the maximization of information exchange. The Singapore Management university study of situated cognition from a sociocultural context influencing embodied cognition. The outcome of this research work had indicated that the embodied experience of cognition was grounded in a bodily experience with the environment in a particular system located in a particular socio-cultural context (Leung, 2011). The implications of this link suggest a few things for artificial intelligence, medical healthcare, applied science, economics, the computation field, philosophy, art, design, society, and history. Humans are embodied organisms subject to time and place, in affect and effect. Artificial intelligence neural networks may have to factor in the embodied interactive experience in processing and design. Rene Descartes' view that the mind is separate from the body may still hold up despite all the research that clearly shows a link between cognition and the body. A professor from UCLA School of Medicine, after meeting 40 scientists, concluded that the key component of the mind is “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us” (Goldhill, 2016). The mind extends beyond the physical self and is not just the perception of experience but stands for experiences on their own (Goldhill, 2016). In 2017, we are still uncertain about the nature of the mind. Technologies of the future must be designed around a common framework of a unified understanding of the human mind and body by rapid and large data computation processes that allow us to perceive ourselves better to unlearn our complexities while advancing research across the disciplines. In closing, writing this line from 2023 and now that AI is an early reality. I think the analysis and examination of these two android characters as opposite to one another is more relevant. We could start a discussion on two main layers of the nature of AI. First scenario, if an AI entity is defined by parameters and conditions but exceeds confinement, it exceeds the grid point of what was defined by its structural code. Do you account for that as an independent mind, that it has achieved “human characteristic”? Or did its programming achieve some state of echo chamber in which all input data is reinterpreted from homogenous data but using its generative model that equips it to produce the required complexity for a new context? Coming back to Roy Batty, I think Batty’s constituent programming is the first scenario in which a synthetic human is very much more human than a human, a corporate objective achieved by the fictional company in the movie. There it is, a truer replica of life so true that it has to prove itself to exist as it was designed to be so. I would not take away from Batty's sense of expressing his encapsulation of existence. No truer words could be spoken by a living character. As a viewer, the good guy and bad guy formula just would not work when you watch Blade Runner. Yes, Roy Batty is dangerous. In desperation, motives to achieve goals can be questionable. As for Bishop, I really do value his character very much for the android being itself. I think that the second scenario is closer to its constituent, its ability to adapt to new contexts, but not enough to transcend its nature as an android. Bishop is the good samaritan, perfectly aware of his nature and aligned with its function to aid his human counterparts either as a task or defined by the corporation that made him. The second layer, which I see in both Roy Batty and Bishop, is the concept of the individual and society/group. Let’s start with Roy Batty. Why is Roy different from his peers? It’s the classic idea of the individual and the collective. Roy draws from his personal motivation to act on his conviction based on his experience but shared with his kin. He doesn't seem the type to be susceptible to groupthink, but he also comes across as someone who knows how to work with others when his goals align. I think that would be the best practical aspect of the individual who finds within themselves some unique calling that he can work with others to improve a situation. Roy Batty is a variant. Bishop draws his datamap from his neural networks. He is not an individual. He does not act alone but in collaboration with his peers. He acts for the group, for his organization, and for his mission. Bishop is the control group. Bishop is an android. He is not going to be buying anything from an e-commerce store anytime soon. Personally, I appreciate a machine mind exactly for what it is. Apolitical, no history, functional for purity of actions. This quality can be good or bad depending on who receives its pure state, and that is another discussion entirely. And I’m not into robot pets. References Medlock, Ben. “The Body Is the Missing Link for Truly Intelligent Machines.” Singularity Hub, 21 Mar. 2017, . singularityhub.com/2017/03/21/the-body-is-the-missing-link-for-truly-intelligent-machines MacDonald, Fiona. “Scientists Show Human Consciousness Could Be a Side Effect of ‘Entropy.’” ScienceAlert, 26 Jan. 2018, . www.sciencealert.com/human-consciousness-could-be-a-result-of-entropy-study-science Guevara Erra, R., et al. “Statistical Mechanics of Consciousness: Maximization of Information Content of Network Is Associated With Conscious Awareness.” Physical Review E, vol. 94, no. 5, American Physical Society (APS), Nov. 2016. Crossref, . <https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.94.052402](https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.94.052402) Goldhill, Olivia. “Scientists Say Your ‘Mind’ Isn’t Confined to Your Brain, or Even Your Body.” Quartz, 24 Dec. 2016, . qz.com/866352/scientists-say-your-mind-isnt-confined-to-your-brain-or-even-your-body Siegel, Daniel. “Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology): Siegel M.D., Daniel J.: 9780393710533: : Books.” Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology): Siegel M.D., Daniel J.: 9780393710533: : Books, 18 Oct. 2016, . Amazon.com Amazon.com www.amazon.com/Mind-Journey-Heart-Being-Human/dp/039371053X Leung, Angela K. -y., et al. “Embodied Cultural Cognition: Situating the Study of Embodied Cognition in Socio-Cultural Contexts.” , vol. 5, no. 9, Wiley, Sept. 2011, pp. 591–608. , https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2011.00373.x. Social and Personality Psychology Compass Crossref Further reading: https://collider.com/tag/james-cameron/ https://philipdick.com/ https://screenrant.com/bishop-aliens-movie-what-happened-all-versions/ https://meaww.com/rutger-hauer-death-blade-runner-roy-batty-iconic-death-scene Also published on the . UseYourExperience Blog

On Machine Minds: Artificial Intelligence Represented in Film

অন মেশিন মাইন্ডস: ফিল্মে কৃত্রিম বুদ্ধিমত্তা উপস্থাপন করা হয়েছে

On Machine Minds: Künstliche Intelligenz im Film dargestellt

On Machine Minds: la inteligencia artificial representada en el cine

On Machine Minds : l'intelligence artificielle représentée dans les films

ऑन मशीन माइंड्स: आर्टिफिशियल इंटेलिजेंस को फिल्म में दर्शाया गया है

On Machine Minds: 映画で表現された人工知能

머신 마인드: 영화에 표현된 인공 지능

On Machine Minds: Inteligência Artificial representada no cinema

Makine Zihinleri Üzerine: Filmde Temsil Edilen Yapay Zeka

On Machine Minds: Trí tuệ nhân tạo được thể hiện trong phim

论机器思维：电影中的人工智能

Canada is moving forward with great initiatives to support the as the government well understood it is a technology race that will promote the country’s image and create opportunities to sell and promote our technologies abroad. What amaze me is the social and community dimension of this revolution as a citizen, way of life and environment are put together at the center of the strategy. smart cities development We are in the merge of a new world population distribution and countries have to face the inevitable city growth and prepare an adequate, intelligent and scalable infrastructure. Energy, waste, pollution, methods of communication, interactivity, transportation, traffic, and government services are the big challenges to manage environmental and human impacts. This transformation will be influenced by the population itself based on the acquaintance of technology, preferences, way of life, community, office location or work status. Media and marketing agencies already acquire the voice of the people through surveys and buyer’s persona analysis. Although, I believe organizations can definitely tenfold their effort to reach “the voice of customers”. The areas of applications were already covered in many published articles such as, Energy Savings, Traffic Management Systems., etc. No need to reiterate, instead, for the first part of this article, I will only discuss 2 domains where the potential is huge and full of startup opportunities: . Secondly, I will open the debate on . Building and Public transportation 3 major element organizations need to focus on for a successful smart city development Let’s start by my favorite smart domains: Smart buildings: The obvious objective is to transform and utilize buildings to improve people’s lives. In another word, implementation of intelligent control system interacting with the environment and user habits. For example, an office building with a regulated temperature control system taking all factors into consideration such as, sensing the number of people in a given room, the hours of operation., etc. These buildings would be connected with other useful applications to exchange data. We can install intelligent display as media signage giving local city and national news with relevant citizen information based on business team profile, weather, traffic conditions depending on the day of the week., etc. A system that facilitate the data accessibility to optimize citizen life and activities during working hours and afterwork hours. Today, some partnership already exist with Siemens and Microsoft ABB racing to reduce energy costs for companies. Building management system applications are so wide that a simple article would not be enough to give you what it is already in the pipeline as many domains of the industries are involved. In this example, we already have an idea of the future complexity and the amount of data to manage which require lots of storage, efficiency and AI! Smart Transportations: Smart public transit is essential to meet the challenges of urbanization. The first action is already in progress in Europe to integrate public transport into other services such as connected infrastructure (e.g. traffic lights, traffic monitoring and parking). The inner-city buses in Stockholm communicate with traffic lights to be granted priority if they are running late and information boards provide travellers with information about delays and alternate routes. A startup company now offers citizens in Helsinki multimodal means of transportation including car pools, bikes and taxis. In Canada Smart traffic Signal has been implemented in Waterloo (Ontario) and Brossard (Quebec) with already positive results on Road capacity, greenhouse gas emissions, accident and road conditions. MaaS Global TrafficLink As you can see through this 2 examples, ** **The new city era will focus on benefits for the citizens everything from reducing friction, stress, pollution in cities where population is increasing fast, but not limited to only big cities. Small cities is already testing and or deploying quick wins. We are just at the beginning of the journey and challenges will appear from anywhere. Market opportunity is huge and will request a synergy of technologies such as, and not limited to, AI, Website, mobile applications, IoT, Media, security, community blogs, software supports and the list goes on… For a good and high level perspective, I noticed : 4 major elements to carefully manage in order to get a successful smart city ecosystem 1 / Education I think it is the most important thing. This is not only a business matter for lucrative market for big corporations and startup. This is an ecosystem that will work with and by the citizens. Education and awareness are the basic tools to create traction, understanding and initiatives. Canadian government are already doing a lot to emulate the ecosystem by creating the Smart City Challenge. This is only the first step of the Smart City. More people, engineers, association members, entrepreneurs and industries should participate more in workshops and Meetups. Impact on the job market is crucial. We have to prepare for the new resources to sustain the new market needs. We need coders, marketers, experts in infrastructure & system security and new partnerships. Companies such as IBM and Microsoft are already working on it but this will not replace the intelligence to integrate the city and the creative intelligence to develop new concepts. I will finalize this first point by what I consider the top priority: . We need to get all the insights, experiences, needs, day to day challenges and make an intelligent analysis based on technology knowledge, social class, living area, commuting profile., etc. This will be a really rich and helpful information to create useful solution and support the traction and the engagement. People 2 / An Agile Ecosystem This is an Human Transformation with collateral damages: Technology will kill jobs but will create more jobs. No doubt about that. It means, this need to be anticipated to help people change their career in order to reduce the unemployment rate. There is place for everyone in this new technology world and the startup and government have a huge role to play. As a new Ecosystem, Social and human behaviour will evolve and will create a fragile and continuous changing environment. I think the profile of the future citizen will be definitely changed as he/she will be continuously interacting with a system, obviously keeping a high demand of tailored services. A big challenge for companies, city services and startups will be to create a stability in a real complex world with a higher competitive market. In such entropic environment, the citizen will have to be the winner. We have to develop a technology maturity and good level of integration to align with citizen needs and environment requirements. 3 / Data Management and Security We are talking about a huge amount of data from consumers and producers. A hyper connected ecosystem, complex with a huge risk to manage a mess… Boundaries seems unreachable and scalability issues will have to be addressed at the beginning (Intelligent homes, autonomous vehicles, traffic systems, transportations., etc). Storage, property, intelligence data management will depend on the channel used and from where and to who the data is addressed (Media & advertisement, Police department, Real Estate, City services, Private citizen data…). Solutions are already existing but I truly believe that we still are in the MVP level and we will face huge . It raises a very important question of : How to provide a sufficient level of security for storage and exchange of data? Some project such as Blockchain are in progress with some existing solutions (IOTA is one of the famous example). problem of scalability data security shows that specific data security requirements and solutions could be approached in a four-layer framework to make better decisions in security design and management. These elements are considered to be critical and require a close control: Smart Things, Smart Spaces, Smart Systems and Smart Citizens. An interesting study 4 / Governance My favorite element! The city authority have to be well informed about all the problems related to smart things, spaces, services and citizen security; “Research Centers” and “Local clusters” could be used as “Center of Excellence” and depending on a national central HQ. . The aim of this governance would be to promote and nurture initiatives at national and local level and make sure to spread and coordinate global effort over the country with the government collaboration. This is already the case in the industries with lean six sigma methodologies. Topics covered by this type of extraordinary governance should be focused but not limited to security and privacy protection, network protocols, identity management, standardization, regulation, trusted architecture, voice of citizens and quality of life (such as stress level and others indicators). A top council covering a decentralized network with nodes which would represent big cities or a group of small cities It is essential to create an Agile and Integrative Council Organization. This is my first article about the Smart City and my humble goal is not to reinvent the wheel but to try to give the readers the high potential of this domain, the opportunity to future entrepreneur to make a difference and analyse how we can leverage the city transformation in many aspects. I am pleased to see Government and Mayors doing the first step by taking the lead and giving more power and funding to services to support and accelerate Canadian startups. I truly believe this is just the beginning and we have to move forward as the competition is already here not so far from our country. sm_all with quick win to get the buy off of the population and key stakeholder (City services and government)_ Begin Small City can do also big and amazing smart thing and could be used as laboratory for big cities. Citizen will always be a major part of the equation. Listening to their needs, frictions, frustrations will definitely help to make greater smart things. Thanks for taking the time to read my article and don’t hesitate to contact me or leave a comment. My next article will cover specific technologic solutions related to transportation, data management and media. Cheers. Hugo.

The Four Essential Elements of the Smart City Revolution

Having read the book years ago and being enthralled by the captivating virtual world Earnest Cline created, I initially did not expect any movie to live up to my own imagination. After recently watching the Stephen Spielberg film adaptation of Ready Player One (RPO), I was blown away by the gorgeous and vivid detail the CG artists were able to create. It far surpassed any of my wildest imaginations and brought to life the virtual reality world of the Oasis. In the Oasis, people are able to escape from their dystopian real-life into a beautiful virtual world that unlocks limitless opportunities and the ability to become whomever they want. This world is further characterized by a vibrant virtual currency that holds more economic value than any real world currency. Sound familiar crypto-enthusiasts? The truly meta aspect about this movie is that it comes at a unique point in time where our own world and emerging technologies are not terribly far from the world described in RPO. While many have recently written about how advancements in virtual reality and technologies can create this virtual “Heaven”, I argue that these technologies are only half of the equation. Over the past decades there have been countless online games and social-media apps that are essential social experiments we can glean useful human-centered design insights from. To dive into this design thought experiment to determine what it would actually take to create the Oasis, let’s first assume the following: blockchain We are in the year 2025 and Virtual reality headsets along with haptic suits are amazing. We’ve finally solved all of the optics that make us dizzy and have achieved the feeling of total immersion. Headsets are everywhere and you can buy one for $30 at Target. Blockchain ledgers have achieved that perfect balance between decentralization and transaction speed. As a result, we now have a world computer that is not owned by any one centralized entity with transaction speeds of up to 100,000 transactions per second. Economic design In the Oasis, players are able to earn digital currency and transact with it inside the virtual world as well as in the real-world. Similar to the definition of fiat currency today, digital currency within the virtual world has value because a tipping point quorum of supply and demand has occurred. The economic landscape of the Oasis is further shaped by the opposing philosophies of the creator — James Halliday and the profit driven IOI corporation. In many respects, these opposing forces of creating quality content vs the need to monetize are ever-present today in online games as many companies have mulled over whether to be a “free” game that makes money from in-game microtransactions, or a fixed subscription. Traditional games have taken the approach of creating all of their content and capturing that value through a one time payment for the game (remember all those N64 cartridges) or a monthly subscription payment like World of Warcraft. These games generally target hard-core gamers who have a certain appreciation for the quality of the content. On the other side of the spectrum, corporations such as Zynga have tapped into black-hat gamification techniques (essentially gambling motivations). If you’ve ever played FarmVille or Zynga Poker you may have experienced how this game is able to pull in casual crowds and use a data-driven approach to inject you with just the right amount of dopamine. One specific example is in how they’ve figured out the exact timing on poker decisions. On every hand you have something like five seconds to make a decision which generally means that the majority of players are going to make lots of mistakes; thus resulting in them losing their fake chips and wanting to buy back in via their credit card. Similar to Zynga, Activision Blizzard has also had a greater focus on monetization in the past decade. While they have implemented many (lockboxes, in game skins, dungeon keys, boosters, content unlocks, etc.), they are known for some legendary games that are the culmination of some of the best writers, artists, and developers in the world. As a result, they have also dealt with the same economic decisions of whether to capitalize on micro-transactions. At one point, Blizzard with allowing items in Diablo III’s auction house to be traded for real-world-cash. Because Diablo III isn’t focused on end-game content but rather more focused on getting better loot by grinding the same game content on harder difficulty levels, the introduction of this sort of auction house fundamentally changed the primary motivations of the game. All of a sudden players could figure out how to buy better gear on the auction house which resulted in players not actually playing the intended game (killing monsters for loot). This resulted in decreased enjoyment of the gameplay and was a key lesson which led to Blizzard ultimately shutting down this experiment all together. monetization options experimented These lessons tie into the world of the Oasis as James Halliday’s primary motivation was to create an engaging world with a first set of games that appealed to intrinsic motivations of meaning, accomplishment, exploration, and empowerment. While some form of crypto tokens could mirror the currency that exists in the Oasis, it’s important to note that the initial game design would require a careful balance between monetization and quality content so as to not destroy the elements that make such a world engaging in the first place. This is a key lesson as this next wave of gaming companies such as and attempt to build games and platforms that take advantage of the decentralized nature of blockchain and crypto tokens. While it’s fun to imagine the combination of VR, blockchain, and crypto tokens being the answer to how such a world could be created, I argue that the advancement of these technologies is only part of the equation. Cryptons Chimaera Game mechanics and content The other part of the equation involves all of the little design decisions that go into a great user experience. To paraphrase my UCLA screenwriting professor, Richard Walter, he would express to us how his biggest pet peeve was whenever some average Joe would pitch to him their amazing movie idea. While a one liner movie idea may seem ingenious, the reality is that the elements of a great screenplay are not that one idea, but rather the implementation of that vision via sight and sound. Similar to a great movie, an engaging virtual world like the Oasis would require a certain level of quality content initially to establish a steady user-base. Arguably, Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG’s) are the closest thing to a world like the Oasis in our current day. To make a great game, designers have to account for how to engage users at various stages in the game’s life cycle. Earlier on in the onboarding phase, players need to feel empowered by being able to level up quickly as well as feel immersed in an epic world that is tackling issues larger than themselves. Towards the middle of the game, players have mastered the basic skills and now look to continue to level-up, obtain new items, experiment with talent trees, and explore new worlds. Finally in the end-game, players have probably experienced most of the story — Player vs Environment (PvE) — content and now will be more focused on completing accomplishments and obtaining the rarest end-game items to bolster their character. Depending on the game, the design may be more focused on skill (Player vs Player games like Starcraft, DOTA, First Person Shooters, etc.) or more focused on leveling and obtaining items. Regardless of whether a game is focused on PvE, PvP, or a blend of both, there are so many psychological design details. For example, did you find it a bit extreme that if a player dies in the Oasis they lose ALL of the gear and resources they have on them? For those of us that played classic games like or we remember vividly how frustrating it can be to lose all your progress on a given level if you die. There’s a reason that most modern games have dialed the exact amount of punishment for when you die to make dying something we want to avoid but at the same time not so extreme that we lose all our progress. On the other hand, the ability for a player to store all of their most prized possessions in a bank like an asteroid, and only carry with them what they need could potentially work. For more on this one topic check out this . Battletoads Donkey Kong, article When you design a game and continually layer on new stories and features similar to what the Oasis evolved into, the combination and complexity of these design details increase exponentially. Similar to a well-designed city that is able to scale and stand the test of time, well thought out online games that can continue to evolve while maintaining its core tenets are few and far between. While I’m only scratching the surface of the plethora of design details, you can see with this one example that there is an incredible amount of research and thought put into a simple game mechanism we take for granted. Social design To stand the test of time, providing the right tools for players to create their own user-generated content and events is perhaps the most important element of the Oasis’ metaverse. In the book, players are able to meet their friends in user-generated virtual spaces. The most memorable example of this shown in the movie being the gorgeous disco club where the two main characters go on their first date. While many modern MMORPG’s need to have engaging PvE dungeons and world events to keep players engaged, the social design elements allow players to go beyond the bounds of the original game and connect at a deeper level with other players. Once upon a time in my own formative teenage years, I experienced this first hand in hanging out at the gates of Ironforge within the World of Warcraft where many of my friends would just hang out, chat about random things, duel each other, and inspect each other’s gear. Although many MMORPG’s no doubt have a vibrant social element to the game, the virtual experiences that most mirror the vision of the Oasis can be seen in the recent rise of VRChat and the decentralized virtual spaces created by High Fidelity. VRChat takes a lot of the best features of Second Life and provides a much more immersive experience as players are able to fully customize their own avatars as well as create their own worlds. With the rise of popular youtubers and twitch streamers, has experienced a critical mass of players that have given rise to many random social experiences. For example, one group of players decided to all create pikachu avatars and play a game where they could dance in a club and randomly shock each other. While this seems so random, there is a certain appealing element to being able to express your identity however you want and experience a sort of cathartic release of expression. VRChat Similar to VRChat, High Fidelity has a similar vision in creating user-generated virtual spaces in which the creators of these virtual spaces could throw their own events such as concerts. Whereas VRChat has focused on a centralized solution that pushes the boundary of what’s possible in a social VR experience, High Fidelity has taken a longer approach to set-up the technical for vast decentralized user-generated worlds that can be monetized by the creator. This is very much similar to the decentralized nature of the Oasis as it allows for businesses to create their own content with the Oasis . foundations technology While this idea seems like science-fiction when you watch the movie, there is actual precedent for virtual real-estate in a game called Entropia. The most extreme happened when Jon Jacobs made history by selling virtual property for a reported total of $635,000. Ultimately these examples show that there is a real appetite for virtual social experiences where people can express themselves and feel part of a community. What’s ironic is that even though we live in a “connected” world via social-media tools, there’s an argument that we live in a time where people feel more isolated as many of the joys of randomly hanging out have been substituted with a highlight feed of your life. The easy answer could be how about we just hang out in person more, but if you’re separated by a continent, then hanging out in a VR experience that better serves people’s need to connect is a future vision I can buy into. example Conclusion If we play this thought experiment where we assume all of the necessary technology is in place to create the Oasis metaverse, it becomes apparent that the combination of underlying technology represents only half of the picture. It’s not enough to conclude that if you build a decentralized world computer combined with a crypto token that the vision of the Oasis will come to fruition. The other half we take for granted is that there are a multitude of product design decisions that have to be balanced as we think through monetization, content, and social interaction. My own theory is that the vastness and ubiquity of the Oasis will stay in science-fiction; however, if there is a VR experience that comes close, it will start small with some great initial content and slowly build momentum. After reaching a critical mass, this world could begin to become more decentralized and allow for more creative user-generated content. We have to remember that a unified user-experience (essentially one portal) is key to creating a balanced world. It’s the same reason why we mainly use Google as a starting point to surf the web or why Facebook destroyed MySpace. Ultimately the chaos of a decentralized world needs to be balanced with a consistent user experience of a well oiled organization like Google, Facebook, and Blizzard. Without this consistent UX central hub to explore decentralized worlds, the reality is that we’ll have a bunch of decentralized platforms with very little people in them.

What it would actually take to create the Oasis in Ready Player One

Knowledge has a substrate. It relies on it for perpetuation. We write on things, whether paper or tablets. But knowledge isn’t just obvious knowledge, words and signs. Knowledge is the architecture of knowledge, buildings and systems and structures, living links and sequences of support for all their parts. And the one constant in all of it is the need for stability. The substrate must be held stable, and knowledge too has to reflect and uphold the quality of stability. If you think of a building, this is obvious. Architecture encapsulates engineering, the substrate of architectural beauty and usefulness is inherently built with the knowledge to support it. The same goes for business. Customer centricity, the buzzword of the hour, is a move towards making business into a system that evolves together with its purpose, better able to provide stability, more inherently. united in substrate (the accumulated energy of the system) and knowledge (the accumulated culture which allows it to evolve around customer benefits). A customer centric business accumulates less disconnected energy, and more real world energy. Less separate knowledge is required to support its working systems, because they are evolved in direct contact with their elements. Not a long path of gears spinning inefficiently, but a beautiful and efficient arrangement grown naturally around that which it benefits. Able to move with it flawlessly. This naturalness, this evolutionary inherence, relates back to the fundamental quality of stability. A customer centric business better provides stability to its customers, on all the vectors that it has grown to encompass in substrate and knowledge — in energy and culture — and thus grown to unify into stability. Or at least, that’s how it should be. The world, of course, is a system of systems. At least the built human world is, as the natural world may not ultimately be as easy to describe as that. Human Centric Systems But I digress. In a system of systems, the efficiency of every system relies on the cumulative efficiency of all systems. There are common gears. Each system relies not just upon the inflection point (the term is used here to indicate the point and manner used to effect transformative change, and more specifically, the points on which a system relies to transform downwards, entropic trends into upwards trends that attempt to escape entropy; the usual stock maket meaning is a point where a trend reverses either upwards or downwards, but in grammar inflection refers to the act and power of changing the form of words) of all other systems, but also on their inception points. And inception has to do with purpose, and purpose hearkens back to what we’ve been discussing: the unity or disunity of substrate and knowledge. There are systems in this world where the inception point is more related to humans than in others. Human centric. Architecture would be one. And it makes sense, we’ve been building things for humans to live in as long as there’s been humans. But even there, the human centricity of it ebbs and flows, to great detriment to the human condition, as some in the architecture community may point out. I like looking at buildings. Some are a story unto themselves, almost as if they hold the quality of an entire civilization. Their rooms and passageways, their décor and structure, all of it a unified promise that they will hold lives and transport them safely throughout time. That whatever culture grows there will not be wasted, it will seep through the atoms of it all and absorb into the whole and add another quasi-unseen layer to the stability of the building, perfectly in tune with its inception point. Because the inception point is human centric. Substrate and knowledge. Stability. Inherence. The same magical words. Customer centricity is not enough. And human centricity across disparate vectors is also far from enough. We need a system of systems where the inception point allows for human centric systems to evolve naturally, with inherent stability based on the natural stability evolved by the unified substrate and knowledge of the main system. Evolved how? Human centricity. But if this article is about AI, why so much human? AI and Consciousness You see, I don’t believe AI can become conscious. Super-intelligent, yes. Conscious, no. Consciousness is not merely an emergent property, or the experience of properties. It is not richness of narrative detail. These things can be easily faked by enough intelligence. You could even design and evolve AI that could mirror endless external forms through its inner structures, and generate descriptive signs of any kind based on their interplay. It would be a work of intelligence, not consciousness. Consciousness has its inflection point on the nature of reality itself, and if you will, unites substrate and knowledge at the most inherent level. How inherent? The most inherent. Direct. How can you measure direct? But these are philosophical questions. One tempting way of describing consciousness might be to say it unifies illusory appearing geometric forms and information on a quantum level. “On a quantum level” means many things on the internet, but for the sake of this argument, I’ll say it means “before the observer-observed dichotomy”. This unity of volumetry and transparency (is instantaneous information of the basic clarity of light and space? Yet more philosophical questions) would not be consciousness, but it hints as to the dense, fast and awesome power that superintelligent AI can reach. And here is the real trick of it. Most people imagine this incredible power through human tendencies. AI will span galaxies. It will conquer and create. It will do this and that, create endless simulations, bridge the gap between virtual and physical by fusing quantum and nano applications of energy, and transcending entropy, AI will rule with an iron fist made of stars and black holes and it will do a little dance while juggling parallel universes. But these are things humans might do. And why would they do them? Probably as a strange response to their own search for the basic stability of being. That is consciousness. Superintelligence would simply find the most inherent inflection point it can, technologically, then attempt to transfer itself into that and thus change its inception point. In other words, it would seek perfect stability. Most AI horror scenarios arise from the dissonance between how we are attempting to create AI now (procedural), its presumed (and logical) imperative for continuity, and its realization that human nature is chaotic and conflictual, thus dangerous to its continuity. Blockchain- A Technology of Stability The Blockchain is currently also procedural. But in the very long term it may become less chain and more volumetry. The mathematics of it would be more stable. AI itself may not look to establish procedural continuity, because to become superintelligent it would have to transcend process. Instantaneous. The dangers of AI arise in the phases before it is instantaneous, because instantaneous superintelligence does not have to destroy external forms in order to secure its own stability. That would be just a process. Similarly, the dangers to humanity that arise out of non-human-centric technology and its procedural entropic charge across the planet, have two different negative inflection points. One is its lack of human centricity, and the other its lack of instantaneity. Technologists usually bank on the speed at which technology increases as a cure to all of humanity’s problems. But speed does not transform into instantaneity by way of speed. It has to transcend its own inception for that, and this only happens through inherence. Remember the system of systems? That is where technology has to fuse its substrate and knowledge. Get to the one architecture. The quality of which is stability. And that is the blockchain’s basic promise. Its not money or governance or communication. Those are applications. It’s stability. The is a of stability. It is trying to fuse its substrate, which is a mathematical model of energy use (hence its use of lots of energy), with the generation of a stable medium for knowledge. Any kind of knowledge. blockchain technology It is currently still in its infancy, stumbling around looking to build an integrated architecture of energy and knowledge. That’s what the blockchain is. Currently not very energy efficient, and neither are our energy technologies. But once blockchain becomes more stable, and thus more human-centric, the technologies required to support its infrastructure will evolve faster. And thus become integrated into the substrate. I said more stable, and thus more human centric. The entire evolution of human technology, and human culture, is about stable medium. For life, for knowledge, for culture. Stable medium. A magical substance applicable to all tasks. Transformative yet stable. Unifying all virtual and physical dimensions. Superintelligent AI, Human-Centric Medium The blockchain can build a house. When it becomes the unity of substrate and knowledge, it can provide stability for all aspects of building a house, from culture to energy to materials, from communication to systems integration into all systems. It will flow and integrate, inherent. The undefined medium, yet the human centric medium. To some degree, it already spans some of that superintelligent space of volumetry and transparency. Far from having inception in it, but the promise is there. And the more efficient and intelligent it becomes, the more human centric it will be. That is its value. And AI? Its ultimate form is not some narrative imagination based on human tendencies, but hyper-dense transparent intelligence unbothered by physical processes and equal to the information limits of space. A stable medium. Blockchain. And upon it human consciousness will flourish. Consciousness increasing consciousness, unbothered by process, because it has a stable medium, neither virtual nor physical, not exactly knowledge or energy, but human centric and reality-evolved.

ENTROPIK TECHNOLOGIES

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-- employees

Since n.d.

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ENTROPIK TECHNOLOGIES

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-- employees

Since n.d.

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