Seraph
Douglas J. Matzke
Seraph
Originally written for ACM97
50th year Anniversary of Computer
SciFi Contest - The next 50 years
The year is 2047, which is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the computer era. In order for this reporter to write a retrospective article on the information revolution over the last 50 years, my editor-in-chief suggested to visit the computer museum in Boston, Massachusetts. This seemed like a great idea, since it is very hard to remember what our culture was like using the conventional computers of 50 years ago. This difficulty is only surpassed by trying to imagine the world of 100 years ago that contained no practical computing machinery.
The original computer museum was established to catalog all the major advances that occurred in computing history during the first 55 years of conventional computing. Of course this all changed early in this century when silicon computers were no longer needed for computing. This museum now stands to remind us of the computers of the past, just as we can reminisce of the days when steam engines were used to drive our locomotives and factories.
Who would have thought that 50 years ago in the heyday of semiconductor based computers that some other information technology would emerge to completely change our understanding and approach to computing. Sure, silicon based semiconductors are still used as the information transducer, but conventional computers with Central Processing Units (CPUs) and memory subsystems no longer exist. Long gone are the days when the computer technology was obsolete every 2-3 years by the newest, smaller, faster, and more powerful models.
As any child of today knows, the technology being furiously developed 50 years ago, such as personal computers, the telephone system, wireless services, satellites, and the internet, no longer exist. Yet, information technology, connectivity services, and computing resources are practically free. Programming the new information systems has also changed dramatically. The societal and cultural changes are even bigger than the technology changes, but did not come directly as a result of the technology advances alone. Information truly is the key to personal freedom, not limitless energy technology, as old science fiction writers always portrayed.
The most astonishing part of this computing revolution is that a child's toy became the turning point for this change in information technology. The other astonishing thing, is the major mechanisms of the new information technology had been known by ancient man for thousands of years, especially the far east countries, even though the technology was rediscovered in the west during the end of the 20th century. The eastern based information technology was rapidly comprehended by western scientists, but it caused a major unexpected discontinuity in the information technology of the time and major shift regarding the nature of science in general.
The original version of the toy sits in the new wing of the computer museum along with pictures of the inventor Zeke and his daughter Katie. How surprising was the accidental discovery and how resistant was the entire scientific field to the consequences of this discovery, even though it had been predicted nearly ten years earlier. Imagine now seeing the toy being operated by Katie the first time, while the design is being described by the inventor.
The toy is nothing more than an 32x32 array of multicolor Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs). The toy was custom built as special art gift by Katie's father using 64 custom semiconductor chips that each drive 16 multicolored LEDs. The semiconductor device Zeke used was originally designed for the novelty market (small flashing pins and badges) with a pseudo random generator and drivers to randomly chose the color for each multicolor LED (using RGB diodes). Fortunately, the part was redesigned by the manufacturer to use a true silicon based white noise generator source, to give better esthetics for the light patterns. The whole light array would dance and shimmer in a mesmerizing random pattern.
Katie liked the gift so much that she would go to sleep with it turned on in her bedroom, similar to having a lighted Christmas tree in her room all the time. Every night Katie would dream about her light toy and imagine her dream friends also playing with it. Since Katie's mother Jasmine was a psychologist, she and Zeke would encourage their daughter to discuss her dreams and help her realize control was possible during lucid dreams (also called color dreams).
One night, her parents came in to turn off the light toy after Katie had fallen asleep, and to their amazement it was not flashing in it's normal random pattern! The toy's panel of lights was producing distinct swirling patterns and other patches of coordinated color. Zeke was so amazed, he video taped the light patterns until they stopped a while later.
Meanwhile, Jasmine had been observing Katie, and realized from her rapid eye movement that she was actively dreaming during the period of the controlled light patterns. As soon as the patterns stopped, the parents determined that Katie had moved onto the next stage of sleep, so they woke her up. Jasmine asked Katie what she had been dreaming about. Katie said that she and her dream friends were having a dream party and the light toy was included in her dream and the lights were coordinated with the music. Katie called her dream pets "dreamsters" since they were little furry creatures similar to her pet hamster.
Katie's parents replayed the video tape of the light toy for her and asked her to have other dream parties on future nights with the intent of repeating the light display. She said that would be easy, since she had dream parties all the time since her father first created her light toy. During her dream party, the dreamsters would all fly and dance around a large ballroom and the light toy would swirl to the music.
Video taping of the dream induced light show continued for several weeks. The parents encouraged Katie to discuss and repeat her dream dances. The next week, her parents found Katie having a dance session while fully awake in her bedroom with some of her favorite dance music. To their utter amazement, the light panel was also making coordinated color patterns, the same as during her dream dance sessions! After a discussion with Katie, they realized she could interact with her toy whenever she wanted and they video taped her awake party control of the light toy, as well as video taping a baseline of the normal random patterns.
Katie's parents started researching what all this meant, from both a psychological, physiological, and physics perspective. Their investigation covered topics from the highest regarded universities and corporations in the world including lucid dreaming research from Stanford University sleep laboratory, consciousness studies from the University of Arizona Medical School, physics & computing research from IBM, MIT and Santa Fe Institute, engineering anomalies research from Princeton University, and alternative medical research based on "Chi" research from major medical laboratories in Japan and US.
Their investigation ultimately resulted in final proof (in western scientific terms) that the human information system we call "mind" is indeed distinct from the physical brain. The mind is really made of the same "information stuff" that defines quantum mechanics, and thus exists outside of the space-time-energy rules of everyday physics. The universe and quantum mechanics is really a large information constraint system that naturally includes the mind while energy conservation, space, and time are all emergent properties of these inherent consistency rules.
Information is more primitive than anything else in the universe, just as pioneer physicists had predicated during the last 30 years of the 20th century. Their predication came as a result of their attempt to unify the theories of gravity and quantum mechanics. They demonstrated that information was equivalent to energy, which was the next logical step after Einstein showed 100 years earlier that energy was equivalent to matter. A "bit" is more than a mathematical abstraction since it is the smallest area change possible to a black hole. Therefore information theory and quantum gravity are both intricately involved with the structure of the universe.
It should have been no surprise that something as adaptive and powerful as the mind would also be intricately involved with the structure of the universe. Critics of artificial intelligence had been stating for the last decades at the end of the 20th century, that the human brain was too slow, used too little power, and had the wrong architecture to be a conventional computer. Conventional transistor based computers during the first decade of this century had reached every size, power, lithographic, speed, reliability, noise floor, and architectural grain size limits that physicists predicated 30 years earlier. Yet computers were not even close to exhibiting the same common sense intelligence and learning behaviors as humans or even simpler animals.
Neural networks, nanoelectronics and biological computers never proved to solve any of the basics problems of physical computing devices either, because of the limits of embedding computation inside physical spacetime. Everyone initially had high hopes for quantum computers to overcome this dilemma, especially after the first low temperature prototypes were built at IBM at the turn of the century. In retrospect, it is now obvious that the light toy would ultimately prove the instability due to accelerated quantum decoherence of such devices. In fact, once the light toy results were comprehended, all conventional semiconductors became subject to disruption by intent from mental "information fields" changing the quantum mechanical based properties and noise characteristics within semiconductors.
This kind of disruption was first evident when a large number of unexplained failures of switched communications systems caused major disruptions in the telephone, cable, and internet systems. This went on for years, with no clear reason, until it was discovered that internet audiovisual chat rooms were joining together large world wide groups of meditators. The communication systems were acting like a large antenna that helped propagate another kind of mental information wave called "Chi".
Chi has been studied for thousands of years in far east countries and was the basis for medical (eg acupuncture) and religious practices. Even though the western scientists of the twenty century did not believe in Chi (since no Chi detection equipment had been invented yet), Chi generators were developed in the mid 1980s in the United States. These generators could rapidly change the rate at which people achieved specialized states of awareness. This mental state was similar to the state Katie was in when interacting with her light toy. The world wide meditations enhanced with Chi broadcast on the internet was changing the quantum mechanical noise floor of all the semiconductors in the communication computers. This unexpected source of noise is similar to other unexpected noise sources throughout history such as background radiation discovered in 1960s, the alpha particle problems in DRAM business in mid 1980s, and cosmic ray induced energetic neutrons discovered in mid 1990s.
Humans had created a new kind of pollution that was disrupting their own computational ecosystem. The human mind really does disrupt modern electronics, just as predicted by an engineer at the 1996 Tucson II, Consciousness Conference. Katie's light toy was the first controlled version of this noise modulation that could be studied. It was a modern version of the random number generators studied during 1980s at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (Pearlab) and elsewhere and was published as an invited paper in 1982 Proceedings of the IEEE. This same noise production was the basis for massive military equipment failures after the new stochastic based DSP engines (using large numbers of white noise generators) came on line early this century. The major reason these devices were failing now was that the human mind had evolved enough to intersect with the emerging electronics that were based on random properties of semiconductors. Resonant tunneling devices and other forms of nanoelectronics were also very sensitive to this kind of quantum noise modulation.
All of this evidence had been mounting for decades, but it was a child's toy that finally proved that the mind is "real" yet non-physical and the universe is fundamentally different than western scientists believed it to be. The far eastern religious notions were actually correct all along and western information theory and quantum gravity research finally comprehended a western style of technological approach to the ancient eastern "Chi" knowledge. The major shift in western science thinking occurred when the evidence was undeniable for a non-physical mind that was completely distinct from the physical brain .
The reason Katie's light toy ushered in a new era, was because Katie was so in tune with her toy, that she could interact with it just as naturally as she could her own antenna-like brain. In fact, it became an extension to her brain. She could interact with it non-locally the same way quantum mechanics interacts thru EPR or Bell's Theorem. Research proved that she could locate the light toy in another building and still stay connected and control it, even when shielded within a Faraday cage. This is similar to "medical intuition" that was demonstrated in the late 1980s and utilized non-local information exchange for medical diagnosis.
It was soon found that Chi generators could be programmed to cause an effect on her light toy, because Chi is really a non-physical information wave with properties similar to quantum fields. Once this was demonstrated, Chi generators were programmed to emit information fields that changed the baseline statistics in quantum experiments, interacted with gravity devices, and modified atomic clocks similar to gravitational acceleration. People who have studied Chi as an apprentice for over twenty years are called "Chi masters". Experiments with Chi masters also produced identical results as the Chi generators on all of these experimental systems. This truly was a human based information technology revolution that was amenable to technological development.
The basis behind the non-physical information fields was a simple idea already partially explored by the famous physicist John Wheeler. A requirement of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and quantum mechanics was that positron-electron pairs could be generated from empty space at zero degrees Kelvin. This so-called zero-point energy content of free space was the basis of Hawking radiation near black holes and demanded that spacetime itself be made of something. John Wheeler proposed it was made of pregeometric spacetime fragments. Since this same uncertainty disallowed any distinction between empty space or space containing matter or energy, it suggested these elements were all made of the same "stuff". These basic building blocks, were later named "rotes" because they were topologically constrained information building blocks that existed in a Hilbert Space (or a high dimensional space of spaces used in the mathematical description of quantum mechanics).
Rotes were mathematically formalized and existed as information encoded topological structures independent of energy, space, and time, similar to early string and membrane theories. Rotes were effectively the quarks, atoms, molecules, and DNA of everything in the universe, including quantum probability distributions, electromagnetic fields, space, time, gravity, Chi, and the human mind. Just as physics, chemistry, and biology are the study of combining primitive building blocks, the new superfield of rotes, called the Unified Science, combined the fields of computer science, high dimensional mathematics, physics, psychology, and Chi. The elusive goal of a unified field theory or grand unified theory was finally reached, but in an unexpected way. Rotes became the final step in the reductionist process of unraveling the universe's secrets, but opened an entire unexpected new realm of unexplored domains do to the non-local and atemporal properties of rotes.
Even though the far eastern countries had first developed for thousands of years the information technology of Chi and human mind, the western scientists had finally developed far enough to comprehend it from their scientific perspective. The inclusion of the ultimate observer of "mind" was exactly the missing piece needed by western science, just as quantum mechanical collapse and gravitational observer frame dictated. Just as many other physics fields and properties became unified under the proper framework, objectivity and subjectivity were really the same thing at this level of description.
The calculus of rotes became the new Boolean algebra for this new information physics. Combinations of rotes created molecules of information that would interact with other rotes in formal ways. These could be constructed into non-physical cellular automata like programs. Katie's dreamsters were exactly those kinds of autonomous information pets. She actually had created an autonomous dreamster that was responsible for activating the light toy.
She named the specific dreamster critter the "chipster" because it interacted with the light controller chips. Katie could control the chipster by mentally petting it and asking it to activate the light display. The chipster was a topologically "static" configuration of rotes that existed within her dream domain but outside spacetime, and had a dynamic characteristic within the spacetime event horizon.
The second law of thermodynamics was not violated by this information exchange, because the chipster only changed the statistics of the physical random process using information fields, and contained no net energy transfer. But it is now obvious that the laws of thermodynamics had to be reworded to include the energy content of the topological structure of the information rotes and a redefinition of closed systems in the face of higher dimensional topologies.
Once large numbers of rote formulas or programs had been discovered and created using the programmable Chi generators, several things became obvious. First, conventional electronics and computers had to ultimately be phased out because they were sensitive to the evolving change in the character of quantum mechanical noise. Second, chipsters could be created and trained to do what computers used to do. Third, the human body, physiological control systems, mind, and emotions could be directly impacted by sending the correct balancing rotes, just as the ancient Chi masters had done for thousands of years. Rotes and Chi are fundamentally the same thing, which is a non-physical information topology. This was already proposed in the mid 1990s in order to resolve the energy-information paradox associated with comprehending the alternative medicine research regarding the placebo effect and Chi.
The application of this kind of mental information technology could have lead to utopia or utter chaos for our society. Fortunately, a very wealthy benevolent funding agent formed the "Plancksoft" corporation in order to research and develop products that would help mankind based on this kind of information technology. The first product introduced was a hand held wireless communications device that worked on topological Hilbert keying. This device obsoleted all communications system being deployed at the time and caused a major shift in the world wide corporate and financial infrastructure.
The next product was a "surreality learning" device that immersed the awake person into an active dream-like state that allowed massive direct learning using mentally targeted rote packets. The surreality learning device was like interacting with an old style "virtual reality" device, but the realism was identical to normal consciousness or lucid dreams. Again the Plancksoft financial structure, technology control, and morals were such that this technology was used exclusively for positive educational purposes. Sophisticated mind based security and training systems were used to screen and train new employees for several years. Each hand picked employee was leveraged so much by this technology, they had an intellectual capital portfolio and productivity unparalleled in any industry.
Based on this kind of technology, everyone wanted access to the Plancksoft products and technology. As a result, Plancksoft expanded to become the largest multinational organization that promoted the benevolent goals of an organized religion and the products of a large multinational corporation. All devices created by the corporation could be selectively enabled or disabled by the corporation and were tamper proof. This prevented theft, reverse engineering, counterfeiting, and black market use of the technology. The programming technology was maintained in the most strict trade secret fashion.
Needless to say, this organization soon had a dramatic impact on governments and laws around the world and promoted the human mind and life enhancing principles. Governments and corporations that did not agree to these terms did not get the technology. Soon educational laws around the world were standardized and changed to utilize the newest learning technology. Needless to say, these programs included strong moral training, control of negative emotions, and consequences of the abuse of mental power.
Technology alone does not create a utopia unless the behavior and thoughts of human beings are fundamentally changed as well. Human emotions, thoughts and desires are also rote based information patterns within the mind. Rote imbalances (or thought bugs) were ultimately measured using Chi based medical detection equipment. Generic balancing patterns were developed that are the information equivalent to daily multivitamins. This removed much of the psychological and physical stress that had held back humanity since the beginning of time.
This same kind of technology started a medical revolution over the last 35 years, that is a blend between the new complementary modalities and traditional western medical procedures. Derived from ancient Chi medical practices, all psychological, chronic degenerative ailments, and viral diseases have been cured with the application of the correct rote based information patterns.
If this article were read 50 years ago, it would have seemed like a fantastic science fiction story. Just as Albert Einstein had changed the 20th century with his discoveries regarding matter-energy and space-time, the information technology revolution that was virtually in place at the end of the 20th century, had a dramatic impact on the science and society of the 21st century.
This process of changing the social structure of the planet is still happening after over thirty years. With the information technological advances and especially the organized social change that followed, came world wide financial and social security. This kind of utopia was predicated by many science fiction writers of the 20th century based on western style energy technology advances alone. The difference here is by integrating eastern and western technology, mankind has understood the universe better and discovered his place within it. On the 100th anniversary of the computer we now understand that everything in the universe is information and it was most likely created as a big thought and not as a big bang.