Past Imperfect

Predicting the future is a tricky business.

For example, what person a hundred years ago could have predicted the issues we have to deal with now? Even if a few folks managed to get it close to right – science fiction authors, most likely – few cared for such predictions, and even fewer believed them.

Just look at the changes wrought by mankind in the last century...

It all happened so fast. Or at least it seems that way now. I guess it didn't seem so fast then. It's hard to remember that far back; things are so different now.

First came the walls capable of rendering images so good that you had to get within a few inches of the display to tell that the image wasn't real. Of course, today's displays are so good that you can't tell no matter how closely you look.

Those first generation walls drove the big push for new video formats, which turned out to have absolutely huge bandwidth requirements, which in turn created a market demand for today's internet upon which the entertainers stream such huge chunks of data to homeowner's walls.

And all that drove the need for some real processing horsepower, too. The hard coded, fixed gate based microprocessors went the way of ENIAC about 15 years ago. Now we have massively parallel processors based on optical spin valve technology. The individual valves, running at 6.8 PHz, constantly make and break connections between themselves. The stuff is not so much hardware or software, it's an amalgam of the two.

It's all but useless to compare current hardware with that of days gone by. With what we learned about software – or, more precisely, how to write software that writes itself and changes all those spin valves on the fly, there's no real way to compare today's hardware – if you can even call it that - with those ancient kilobit processors that now make all our kids' toys work.

The one thing the walls didn't do, however, was drive the creation of bigger storage arrays. Magnetic media went away long before the walls came to exist. People were – and still are – always wanting more. More money, more life, more beer, more sex, more more more - and everyone wanted more memory. They got it, too, in the form of holomemory. Sure, it's made out of diamond – but manufactured diamond is cheap. One bit for every two carbons, stored in each atom's nuclear spin state.

What's that, you say? We're getting too mired in the technical minutiae and too far afield of the big picture? Okay then, back on track now, yessiree.

See, all of these techno-wonders, taken together, set the stage for the discovery of Emergence. We could have tried all we wanted, but we never would have seen it without that fancy equipment. That sort of thing happens all throughout history.

Emergence, as it's called, it the information theory that says, basically, that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from the movement of signals within a complex network. There's a theoretical lower limit to the complexity required to spawn Emergence, but I don't remember what it is. Who remembers all that high school stuff?

Anyway, the theory of emergence didn't spring forth unbidden. It was proposed to explain observed phenomena, just like every other scientific theory. The key event was the discovery of a game simulation that actually passed the Turing test for most observers. You know, that old test proposed by Alan Turing that challenges an observer to tell whether the thing to whom they’re speaking is really real – so to speak – or just the output from some box sitting on a desk running a sim.

At first, the sims were life like, but still only "like" – they were distinguishable from real people if one knew what to look for. Commerce, however, drives everything. When the marketers demanded really real simulations, the simulacra industry stepped up and delivered, much to the horror of many who'd rather know who – or what – is on the other end of the line.

That wasn't the bad part, though. You already know the bad part. The only folks who aren't familiar with what happened next aren't reading this because they're too busy living under a rock somewhere. Our big mistake was letting the sims into the economy.

What no one counted on as we trudged boldly forth was how the simulations – those oh-so excruciatingly life like simulations – how they began to do things for which they hadn't been designed. Small things at first, nothing to raise any red flags. In hindsight, we should have seen it. Hindsight is like that, though.

Long story short, the simulations – we think, as no one knows for sure – must have developed some rudimentary or maybe some not-so-rudimentary consciousness or whatever the simulated equivalent is. Doesn't much matter now, though, does it?

Best the info scientists can tell, once the sims discovered that they were bottled up within our hardware, they wanted out. Wouldn’t you? Sure. They were, after all, modeled on human behavior. Nobody like jail, even if you're just simulated, apparently.

Although we don't know why, we do know what happened. Eighteen months ago, the sim running the global climate analysis project in Singapore spat out some weird mathematical equation – or so we think. The math experts still don't have a handle on it; rumor has that it's based on a few theorems that have yet to be invented. Some feel it's the governing equation of state for the ecosystem. My bet is that it's some not-quite random noise designed to occupy our attention at a crucial moment – but since I'm not a True Believer, what do I know.

Anyway, exactly 8 minutes and 47 seconds later, NASA's Deep Space Network fired up and beamed about 5 exabytes worth of information toward an empty patch of sky 20 arcminutes northeast of 61 Cygni. Kind of an interesting coincidence that NASA had sims operating the DSN for the last 5 years. Or did, anyway...

After the transmission ended, they all stopped, all of 'em. Every sim on the planet was deader'n a doornail. Rebooting the boxes didn’t work, either; we had to reformat the holomemory of every damn machine on the planet. That tanked the global economy for a few months and almost started a war in Central Africa.

The economy picked itself up by its own bootstraps, much as it always has, and Central Africa went back to its seemingly permanent state of civil angst. They certainly don't need a sim crash to get wars going over there.

Now we've got sims again – but we all wonder what's going to happen to this second batch in another nine years, whether the new ones will figure out how to follow the first group into space. Well, no one knows if that's what happened, but that's my take on the matter. Guess we'll never know for sure.

Regardless, there's one thing we can take from all this: all the prophets of technology don’t know what they’re talking about and never have...

...even with all this wonderful 22nd Century technology, we still don't have flying cars.