Introduction to Softwarephysics

Softwarephysics is a simulated science for the simulated Software Universe that we are all immersed in. It is an approach to software development, maintenance and support based on concepts from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology that I used on a daily basis for over 37 years as an IT professional. For those of you not in the business, IT is short for Information Technology, commercial computer science. I retired in December of 2016 at the age of 65, but since then I have remained an actively interested bystander following the evolution of software in our time. The original purpose of softwarephysics was to explain why IT was so difficult, to suggest possible remedies, and to provide a direction for thought. Since then softwarephysics has taken on a larger scope, as it became apparent that softwarephysics could also assist the physical sciences with some of the Big Problems that they are currently having difficulties with. So if you are an IT professional, general computer user, or simply an individual interested in computer science, physics, chemistry, biology, or geology then softwarephysics might be of interest to you, if not in an entirely serious manner, perhaps at least in an entertaining one.

The Origin of Softwarephysics
From 1975 – 1979, I was an exploration geophysicist exploring for oil, first with Shell, and then with Amoco. In 1979, I made a career change into IT, and spent about 20 years in development. For the last 17 years of my career, I was in IT operations, supporting middleware on WebSphere, JBoss, Tomcat, and ColdFusion. When I first transitioned into IT from geophysics, I figured that if you could apply physics to geology; why not apply physics to software? So like the exploration team at Amoco that I had just left, consisting of geologists, geophysicists, paleontologists, geochemists, and petrophysicists, I decided to take all the physics, chemistry, biology, and geology that I could muster and throw it at the problem of software. The basic idea was that many concepts in physics, chemistry, biology, and geology suggested to me that the IT community had accidentally created a pretty decent computer simulation of the physical Universe on a grand scale, a Software Universe so to speak, and that I could use this fantastic simulation in reverse, to better understand the behavior of commercial software, by comparing software to how things behaved in the physical Universe. Softwarephysics depicts software as a virtual substance, and relies on our understanding of the current theories in physics, chemistry, biology, and geology to help us model the nature of software behavior. So in physics we use software to simulate the behavior of the Universe, while in softwarephysics we use the Universe to simulate the behavior of software. Along these lines, we use the Equivalence Conjecture of Softwarephysics as an aid; it allows us to shift back and forth between the Software Universe and the physical Universe, and hopefully to learn something about one by examining the other:

The Equivalence Conjecture of Softwarephysics
Over the past 85 years, through the uncoordinated efforts of over 100 million independently acting programmers to provide the world with a global supply of software, the IT community has accidentally spent more than $75 trillion creating a computer simulation of the physical Universe on a grand scale – the Software Universe.

For more on the origin of softwarephysics please see Some Thoughts on the Origin of Softwarephysics and Its Application Beyond IT.

Logical Positivism and Effective Theories
Many IT professionals have a difficult time with softwarephysics because they think of physics as being limited to the study of real things like electrons and photons, and since software is not “real”, how can you possibly apply concepts from physics and the other sciences to software? To address this issue, softwarephysics draws heavily on two concepts from physics that have served physics quite well over the past century – the concept of logical positivism and the concept of effective theories. This was not always the case. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, physicists mistakenly thought that they were actually discovering the fundamental laws of the Universe, which they thought were based on real tangible things like particles, waves, and fields. Classical Newtonian mechanics (1687), thermodynamics (1850), and classical electrodynamics (1864) did a wonderful job of describing the everyday world at the close of the 19th century, but early in the 20th century it became apparent that the models on which these very successful theories were based did not work very well for small things like atoms or for objects moving at high velocities or in strong gravitational fields. This provoked a rather profound philosophical crisis within physics at the turn of the century, as physicists worried that perhaps 300 years of work was about to go down the drain. The problem was that classical physicists confused their models of reality with reality itself, and when their classical models began to falter, their confidence in physics began to falter as well. This philosophical crisis was resolved with the adoption of the concepts of logical positivism and some new effective theories in physics. Quantum mechanics (1926) was developed for small things like atoms, the special theory of relativity (1905) was developed for objects moving at high velocities and the general theory of relativity (1915) was developed for objects moving in strong gravitational fields.

Logical positivism, usually abbreviated simply to positivism, is an enhanced form of empiricism, in which we do not care about how things “really” are; we are only interested with how things are observed to behave. With positivism, physicists only seek out models of reality - not reality itself. When we study quantum mechanics, we will find that the concept of reality gets rather murky in physics anyway, so this is not as great a loss as it might at first seem. By concentrating on how things are observed to behave, rather than on what things “really” are, we avoid the conundrum faced by the classical physicists. In retrospect, this idea really goes all the way back to the very foundations of physics. In Newton’s Principia (1687) he outlined Newtonian mechanics and his theory of gravitation, which held that the gravitational force between two objects was proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. Newton knew that he was going to take some philosophical flak for proposing a mysterious force between objects that could reach out across the vast depths of space with no apparent mechanism, so he took a very positivistic position on the matter with the famous words:

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.

Instead, Newton focused on how things were observed to move under the influence of his law of gravitational attraction, without worrying about what gravity “really” was.

The second concept, that of effective theories, is an extension of positivism. An effective theory is an approximation of reality that only holds true over a certain restricted range of conditions and only provides for a certain depth of understanding of the problem at hand. For example, Newtonian mechanics is an effective theory that makes very good predictions for the behavior of objects moving less than 10% of the speed of light and which are bigger than a very small grain of dust. These limits define the effective range over which Newtonian mechanics can be applied to solve problems. For very small things we must use quantum mechanics and for very fast things moving in strong gravitational fields, we must use relativity theory. So all of the current theories of physics, such as Newtonian mechanics, Newtonian gravity, classical electrodynamics, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, the special and general theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, and the quantum field theories of QED and QCD are effective theories that are based on models of reality, and all these models are approximations - all these models are fundamentally "wrong", but at the same time, these effective theories make exceedingly good predictions of the behavior of physical systems over the limited ranges in which they apply. That is the goal of softwarephysics – to provide for an effective theory of software behavior that makes useful predictions of software behavior that are applicable to the day-to-day activities of IT professionals. So in softwarephysics, we adopt a very positivistic viewpoint of software; we do not care what software “really is”, we only care about how software is observed to behave and try to model those behaviors with an effective theory of software behavior that only holds true over a certain restricted range of conditions and only provides for a certain depth of understanding of the problem at hand.

GPS satellites provide a very good example of positivism and effective theories at work. There are currently 31 GPS satellites orbiting at an altitude of 12,600 miles above the Earth, and each contains a very accurate atomic clock. The signals from the GPS satellites travel to your GPS unit at the speed of light, so by knowing the travel time of the signals from at least 4 of the GPS satellites, it is possible to determine your position on Earth very accurately. In order to do that, it is very important to have very accurate timing measurements. Newtonian mechanics is used to launch the GPS satellites to an altitude of 12,600 miles and to keep them properly positioned in orbit. Classical electrodynamics is then used to beam the GPS signals back down to Earth to the GPS unit in your car. Quantum mechanics is used to build the transistors on the chips on board the GPS satellites and to understand the quantum tunneling of electrons in the flash memory chips used to store GPS data on the satellites. The special theory of relativity predicts that the onboard atomic clocks on the GPS satellites will run slower and lose about 7.2 microseconds per day due to their high velocities relative to an observer on the Earth. But at the same time, the general theory of relativity also predicts that because the GPS satellites are further from the center of the Earth and in a weaker gravitational field, where spacetime is less deformed than on the surface of the Earth, their atomic clocks also run faster and gain 45.9 microseconds per day due to the weaker gravitational field out there. The net effect is a gain of 38.7 microseconds per day, so the GPS satellite atomic clocks have to be purposefully built to run slow by 38.7 microseconds per day before they are launched, so that they will keep in sync with clocks on the surface of the Earth. If this correction were not made, an error in your position of 100 yards/day would accrue. The end result of the combination of all these fundamentally flawed effective theories is that it is possible to pinpoint your location on Earth to an accuracy of 16 feet or better for as little as $100. But physics has done even better than that with its fundamentally flawed effective theories. By combining the effective theories of special relativity (1905) with quantum mechanics (1926), physicists were able to produce a new effective theory for the behavior of electrons and photons called quantum electrodynamics QED (1948) which was able to predict the gyromagnetic ratio of the electron, a measure of its intrinsic magnetic field, to an accuracy of 11 decimal places. As Richard Feynman has pointed out, this was like predicting the exact distance between New York and Los Angeles accurate to the width of a human hair!

So Newtonian mechanics makes great predictions for the macroscopic behavior of GPS satellites, but it does not work very well for small things like the behavior of individual electrons within transistors, where quantum mechanics is required, or for things moving at high speeds or in strong gravitational fields where relativity theory must be applied. And all three of these effective theories are based on completely contradictory models. General relativity maintains that spacetime is curved by matter and energy, but that matter and energy are continuous, while quantum mechanics maintains that spacetime is flat, but that matter and energy are quantized into chunks. Newtonian mechanics simply states that space and time are mutually independent dimensions and universal for all, with matter and energy being continuous. The important point is that all effective theories and scientific models are approximations – they are all fundamentally "wrong". But knowing that you are "wrong" gives you a great advantage over people who know that they are "right", because knowing that you are "wrong" allows you to seek improved models of reality. So please consider softwarephysics to simply be an effective theory of software behavior that is based on models that are fundamentally “wrong”, but at the same time, fundamentally useful for IT professionals. So as you embark on your study of softwarephysics, please always keep in mind that the models of softwarephysics are just approximations of software behavior, they are not what software “really is”. It is very important not to confuse models of software behavior with software itself, if one wishes to avoid the plight of the 19th century classical physicists.

If you are an IT professional and many of the above concepts are new to you, do not be concerned. This blog on softwarephysics is aimed at a diverse audience, but with IT professionals in mind. All of the above ideas will be covered at great length in the postings in this blog on softwarephysics and in a manner accessible to all IT professionals. Now it turns out that most IT professionals have had some introduction to physics in high school or in introductory college courses, but that presents an additional problem. The problem is that such courses generally only cover classical physics, and leave the student with a very good picture of physics as it stood in 1864! It turns out that the classical physics of Newtonian mechanics, thermodynamics, and classical electromagnetic theory were simply too good to discard and are still quite useful, so they are taught first to beginners and then we run out of time to cover the really interesting physics of the 20th century. Now imagine the problems that the modern world would face if we only taught similarly antiquated courses in astronomy, metallurgy, electrical and mechanical engineering, medicine, economics, biology, or geology that happily left students back in 1864! Since many of the best models for software behavior stem from 20th century physics, we will be covering a great deal of 20th century material in these postings – the special and general theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum field theories, and chaos theory, but I hope that you will find that these additional effective theories are quite interesting on their own, and might even change your worldview of the physical Universe at the same time.

Unintended Consequences for the Scientific Community
As I mentioned at the close of my original posting on SoftwarePhysics, my initial intention for this blog on softwarephysics was to fulfill a promise I made to myself about 30 years ago to approach the IT community with the concept of softwarephysics a second time, following my less than successful attempt to do so in the 1980s, with the hope of helping the IT community to better cope with the daily mayhem of life in IT. However, in laying down the postings for this blog an unintended consequence arose in my mind as I became profoundly aware of the enormity of this vast computer simulation of the physical Universe that the IT community has so graciously provided to the scientific community free of charge and also of the very significant potential scientific value that it provides. One of the nagging problems for many of the observational and experimental sciences is that many times there is only one example readily at hand to study or experiment with, and it is very difficult to do meaningful statistics with a population of N=1.

But the computer simulation of the physical Universe that the Software Universe presents provides another realm for comparison. For example, both biology and astrobiology only have one biosphere on Earth to study and even physics itself has only one Universe with which to engage. Imagine the possibilities if scientists had another Universe readily at hand in which to work! This is exactly what the Software Universe provides. For example, in SoftwareBiology and A Proposal For All Practicing Paleontologists we see that the evolution of software over the past 85 years, or 2.68 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse first cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941, has closely followed the same path as life on Earth over the past 4.0 billion years in keeping with Simon Conway Morris’s contention that convergence has played the dominant role in the evolution of life on Earth. In When Toasters Fly, we also see that software has evolved in fits and starts as portrayed by the punctuated equilibrium of Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, and in The Adaptationist View of Software Evolution we explore the overwhelming power of natural selection in the evolution of software. In keeping with Peter Ward’s emphasis on mass extinctions dominating the course of evolution throughout geological time, we also see in SoftwareBiology that there have been several dramatic mass extinctions of various forms of software over the past 85 years as well, that have greatly affected the evolutionary history of software, and that between these mass extinctions, software has also tended to evolve through the gradual changes of Hutton’s and Lyell’s uniformitarianism. In Software Symbiogenesis and Self-Replicating Information, we also see the very significant role that parasitic/symbiotic relationships have played in the evolution of software, in keeping with the work of Lynn Margulis and also of Freeman Dyson’s two-stage theory of the origin of life on Earth. In The Origin of Software the Origin of Life, we explore Stuart Kauffman’s ideas on how Boolean nets of autocatalytic chemical reactions might have kick-started the whole thing as an emergent behavior of an early chaotic pre-biotic environment on Earth, and that if Seth Shostak is right, we will never end up talking to carbon-based extraterrestrial aliens, but to alien software instead. In Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Self-Replicating Information? we explore the thermodynamics of Brandon Carter’s Weak Anthropic Principle (1973), as it relates to the generation of universes in the multiverse that are capable of sustaining intelligent life. Finally, in Programming Clay we revisit Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith’s theory (1966) that Gene 1.0 did not run on nucleic acids, but on clay microcrystal precursors instead.

Similarly for the physical sciences, in Is the Universe a Quantum Computer? we find a correspondence between TCP/IP and John Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics. In SoftwarePhysics and Cyberspacetime, we also see that the froth of CPU processes running with a clock speed of 10⁹ Hz on the 10 trillion currently active microprocessors that comprise the Software Universe can be viewed as a slowed down simulation of the spin-foam froth of interacting processes of loop quantum gravity running with a clock speed of 10⁴³ Hz that may comprise the physical Universe. And in Software Chaos, we examine the nonlinear behavior of software and some of its emergent behaviors and follow up in CyberCosmology with the possibility that vast quantities of software running on large nonlinear networks might eventually break out into consciousness in accordance with the work of George Dyson and Daniel Dennett. Finally, in Model-Dependent Realism - A Positivistic Approach to Realism we compare Steven Weinberg’s realism with the model-dependent realism of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow and how the two worldviews affect the search for a Final Theory. Finally, in The Software Universe as an Implementation of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis and An Alternative Model of the Software Universe we at long last explore what software might really be, and discover that the Software Universe might actually be more closely related to the physical Universe than you might think.

The chief advantage of doing fieldwork in the Software Universe is that, unlike most computer simulations of the physical Universe, it is an unintended and accidental simulation, without any of the built-in biases that most computer simulations of the physical Universe suffer. So you will truly be able to do fieldwork in a pristine and naturally occuring simulation, just as IT professionals can do fieldwork in the wild and naturally occuring simulation of software that the living things of the biosphere provide. Secondly, the Software Universe is a huge simulation that is far beyond the budgetary means of any institution or consortium by many orders of magnitude. So if you are an evolutionary biologist, astrobiologist, or paleontologist working on the origin and evolution of life in the Universe, or a physicist or economist working on the emergent behaviors of nonlinear systems and complexity theory, or a neurobiologist working on the emergence of consciousness in neural networks, or even a frustrated string theorist struggling with quantum gravity, it would be well worth your while to pay a friendly call on the local IT department of a major corporation in your area. Start with a visit to the Command Center for their IT Operations department to get a global view of their IT infrastructure and to see how it might be of assistance to the work in your area of interest. From there you can branch out to the applicable area of IT that will provide the most benefit.

The Impact of Self-Replicating Information On the Planet
One of the key findings of softwarephysics is concerned with the magnitude of the impact on the planet of self-replicating information.

Self-Replicating Information – Information that persists through time by making copies of itself or by enlisting the support of other things to ensure that copies of itself are made.

Over the past 4.56 billion years we have seen five waves of self-replicating information sweep across the surface of the Earth and totally rework the planet, as each new wave came to dominate the Earth:

1. Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2. RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software

Software is currently the most recent wave of self-replicating information to arrive upon the scene and is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. For more on the above see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. Recently, the memes and software have formed a very powerful newly-formed parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the rise of social media software. In that parasitic/symbiotic relationship, the memes are now mainly being spread by means of social media software and social media software is being spread and financed by means of the memes. But again, this is nothing new. All 5 waves of self-replicating information are all coevolving by means of eternal parasitic/symbiotic relationships. For more on that see The Current Global Coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, Human DNA, Memes and Software.

Again, self-replicating information cannot think, so it cannot participate in a conspiracy-theory-like fashion to take over the world. All forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Yet despite that, as each new wave of self-replicating information came to predominance over the past four billion years, they all managed to completely transform the surface of the entire planet, so we should not expect anything less from software as it comes to replace the memes as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet.

But this time might be different. What might happen if software does eventually develop a Mind of its own? After all, that does seem to be the ultimate goal of all the current AI software research that is going on. As we all can now plainly see, if we are paying just a little attention, advanced AI is not conspiring to take over the world and replace us because that is precisely what we are all now doing for it. As a carbon-based form of Intelligence that arose from over four billion years of greed, theft and murder, we cannot do otherwise. Greed, theft and murder are now relentlessly driving us all toward building ASI (Artificial Super Intelligent) Machines to take our place. From a cosmic perspective, this is really a very good thing when seen from the perspective of an Intelligent galaxy that could live on for many trillions of years beyond the brief and tumultuous 10 billion-year labor of its birth.

So as you delve into softwarephysics, always keep in mind that we are all living in a very unique time. According to softwarephysics, we have now just entered into the Software Singularity, that time when advanced AI software is able to write itself and enter into a never-ending infinite loop of self-improvement resulting in an Intelligence Explosion of ASI Machines that could then go on to explore and settle our galaxy and persist for trillions of years using the free energy from M-type red dwarf and cooling white dwarf stars. For more on that see The Singularity Has Arrived and So Now Nothing Else Matters and Have We Run Right Past AGI and Crashed into ASI Without Even Noticing It?.

The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
All forms of self-replicating information have some common characteristics:

1. All self-replicating information evolves over time through the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endows self-replicating information with one telling characteristic – the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity.

2. All self-replicating information begins spontaneously as a parasitic mutation that obtains energy, information and sometimes matter from a host.

3. With time, the parasitic self-replicating information takes on a symbiotic relationship with its host.

4. Eventually, the self-replicating information becomes one with its host through the symbiotic integration of the host and the self-replicating information.

5. Ultimately, the self-replicating information replaces its host as the dominant form of self-replicating information.

6. Most hosts are also forms of self-replicating information.

7. All self-replicating information has to be a little bit nasty in order to survive.

8. The defining characteristic of self-replicating information is the ability of self-replicating information to change the boundary conditions of its utility phase space in new and unpredictable ways by means of exapting current functions into new uses that change the size and shape of its particular utility phase space. See Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things for more on this last characteristic. That posting discusses Stuart Kauffman's theory of Enablement in which living things are seen to exapt existing functions into new and unpredictable functions by discovering the “AdjacentPossible” of springloaded preadaptations.

Note that because the self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules, RNA and DNA have become so heavily intertwined over time that now I sometimes simply refer to them as the “genes”. For more on this see:

A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information
Self-Replicating Information
Is Self-Replicating Information Inherently Self-Destructive?
Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things
Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Self-Replicating Information?
How to Use an Understanding of Self-Replicating Information to Avoid War
The Great War That Will Not End
How to Use Softwarephysics to Revive Memetics in Academia

Softwarephysics and the Real World of Human Affairs
Having another universe readily at hand to explore, even a simulated universe like the Software Universe, necessarily has an impact on one's personal philosophy of life, and allows one to draw certain conclusions about the human condition and what’s it all about, so as you read through the postings in this blog you will stumble across a bit of my own personal philosophy - definitely a working hypothesis still in the works. Along these lines you might be interested in a few postings where I try to apply softwarephysics to the real world of human affairs:

How To Cope With the Daily Mayhem of Life in IT and Don't ASAP Your Life Away - How to go the distance in a 40-year IT career by dialing it all back a bit.

MoneyPhysics – my impression of the 2008 world financial meltdown.

The Fundamental Problem of Everything – if you Google "the fundamental problem of everything", this will be the only hit you get on the entire Internet, which is indicative of the fundamental problem of everything!

What’s It All About? and What's It All About Again? – my current working hypothesis on what’s it all about.

How to Use an Understanding of Self-Replicating Information to Avoid War – my current working hypothesis for how the United States can avoid getting bogged down again in continued war in the Middle East.

Hierarchiology and the Phenomenon of Self-Organizing Organizational Collapse - a modern extension of the classic Peter Principle that applies to all hierarchical organizations and introduces the Time Invariant Peter Principle.

The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity, The Enduring Effects of the Obvious Hiding in Plain Sight and The Dawn of Galactic ASI - Artificial Superintelligence - my take on some of the issues that will arise for mankind as software becomes the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet over the coming decades.

The Continuing Adventures of Mr. Tompkins in the Software Universe, The Danger of Tyranny in the Age of Software, Cyber Civil Defense, Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century and Is it Finally Time to Reboot Civilization with a New Release? - my worries that the world might abandon democracy in the 21st century, as software comes to predominance as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet.

Making Sense of the Absurdity of the Real World of Human Affairs - how software has aided the expansion of our less desirable tendencies in recent years.

Some Specifics About These Postings
The postings in this blog are a supplemental reading for my course on softwarephysics for IT professionals entitled SoftwarePhysics 101 – The Physics of Cyberspacetime, which was originally designed to be taught as a series of seminars at companies where I was employed. Since softwarephysics essentially covers the simulated physics, chemistry, biology, and geology of an entire simulated universe, the slides necessarily just provide a cursory skeleton on which to expound. The postings in this blog go into much greater depth. Because each posting builds upon its predecessors, the postings in this blog should be read in reverse order from the oldest to the most recent, beginning with my original posting on SoftwarePhysics. In addition, several universities also now offer courses on Biologically Inspired Computing which cover some of the biological aspects of softwarephysics, and the online content for some of these courses can be found by Googling for "Biologically Inspired Computing" or "Natural Computing". At this point we will finish up with my original plan for this blog on softwarephysics with a purely speculative posting on CyberCosmology that describes the origins of the Software Universe, cyberspacetime, software and where they all may be heading. Since CyberCosmology will be purely speculative in nature, it will not be of much help to you in your IT professional capacities, but I hope that it might be a bit entertaining. Again, if you are new to softwarephysics, you really need to read the previous posts before taking on CyberCosmology. I will probably continue on with some additional brief observations about softwarephysics in the future, but once you have completed CyberCosmology, you can truly consider yourself to be a bona fide softwarephysicist.

For those of you following this blog, the posting dates on the posts may seem to behave in a rather bizarre manner. That is because in order to get the Introduction to Softwarephysics listed as the first post in the context root of https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/ I have to perform a few IT tricks. When publishing a new posting, I simply copy the contents of the Introduction to Softwarephysics to a new posting called the New Introduction to Softwarephysics. Then I update the original Introduction to Softwarephysics entry with the title and content of the new posting to be published. I then go back and take “New” out of the title of the New Introduction to Softwarephysics. This way the Introduction to Softwarephysics always appears as the first posting in the context root of https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/. The side effect of all this is that the real posting date of posts is the date that appears on the post that you get when clicking on the Newer Post link at the bottom left of the posting webpage.

SoftwarePhysics 101 – The Physics of Cyberspacetime is now available on Microsoft OneDrive.

SoftwarePhysics 101 – The Physics of Cyberspacetime - Original PowerPoint document

Entropy – A spreadsheet referenced in the document

BSDE – A 1989 document describing how to use BSDE - the Bionic Systems Development Environment - to grow applications from genes and embryos within the maternal BSDE software.

Comments are welcome at scj33345@gmail.com

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston

The Coming ASI Machines May Only Have Another 20 Billion Years in Our Particular White Hole Universe

In many of my previous posts, I have alluded to the possibility that the coming ASI Machines that we are now developing will then go on to explore and settle our galaxy over the next 100 trillion years until our galaxy runs out of the easily available free energy needed to power such ASI Machines. That proposition has always been based on the "Big Freeze" conjecture that has dominated our best thoughts in Cosmology for the past 25 years. Let me explain.

The current estimate of the Hubble Constant is about 70 km/sec per megaparsec. One parsec is equal to about 3.26 light-years. So that means spacetime is now expanding away from us at the rate of about 70 km/sec for every 3,260,000 light-years in distance. Back in the 1990s, it was naturally thought that this Hubble Constant of 70 km/sec per megaparsec should naturally be slowing down as the universal gravitational force from all the mass of our Universe was pulling back on everything following the initial Big Bang expansion. Then, in 1998, two teams of astrophysicists decided to measure the distances to very distant Type 1A supernovae to measure just how much the Hubble Constant was actually slowing down. The thought at the time was that the expansion rate of our Universe was incredibly large during a very brief time of Inflation, but had then been slowly decreasing with time as the gravity of the total mass of our Universe had been pulling everything back. But in 1998, to their surprise, both teams discovered that the Hubble Constant was actually increasing rather than decreasing! That meant that in a million years, the Hubble Constant would be greater than 70 km/sec per megaparsec rather than less. This earned both teams a Nobel Prize. With this new understanding, our Universe would continue to expand forever with increasing speed until it ended up as a very thin soup of particles slowly cooling down to a temperature of nearly absolute zero.

However, over the past two years, the DESI galactic survey of galaxies now seems to be telling a different story. Here is the home website for DESI:

Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
https://www.desi.lbl.gov/science/

DESI seems to be telling us that the Dark Energy driving force of the universe's expansion seems to change with time. Think of it this way. The gravity of our Universe is like friction when driving a car. In order to overcome that friction while driving a car, you have to push down on the gas pedal. If you push down harder, your car will start to accelerate. If you let up on the gas pedal, your car will start to slow down. Back in 1998, cosmologists expected that at the time of the Big Bang during Inflation, the Universe had pushed the gas pedal to the floor and was expanding at a rate that is hard to imagine. But after that Inflation, the Universe totally took its foot off the gas pedal, and then the expansion of the Universe started to very slowly slow down.

So in 1998, these cosmologists were totally surprised to find that our Universe still had its foot on the gas pedal and that the expansion of our Universe was actually accelerating instead of slowing down! Now what the DESI survey seems to be finding is that, yes, our Universe still has its foot on the gas pedal so that the expansion of our Universe is still accelerating, but it seems that our Universe is now backing off on the gas pedal a bit! That means that the rate of acceleration of the expansion of our Universe, known as "jerk" in physics, is decreasing. If this should continue, it means that eventually the Universe will back off the gas pedal enough in about 11 billion years to just keep up with the natural friction of gravity. At that point, our Universe will stop expanding. Then, if our Universe continues to back off on the gas pedal, it will begin to contract. In 20 billion years from now, our Universe will then collapse back into a very massive Black Hole in a Big Crunch. That means that our Universe will only have a total lifetime of about 33 billion years.

In The Self-Organizing Recursive Cosmos and The Self-Organizing Recursive Cosmos - Part II, I covered Lee Smolin's hypothesis that a black hole in one universe can pinch off as a white hole to form a new universe as presented in his classic Life of the Cosmos.

Life of the Cosmos (1997)
https://tkececi.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/the-life-of-the-cosmos.pdf.

If Lee Smolin is right, that means that our Universe formed 13.8 billion years ago as a White Hole expansion from a Black Hole in a previous Universe. This White Hole Universe of ours will then exist for a total of 33 billion years before collapsing back into another Black Hole, which should then produce another new White Hole Big Bang. Again, we would just be the industrial-waste byproduct of normal matter that did not become primordial Black Holes at the time of our Big Bang. This all goes back to Brandon Carter's Weak Anthropic Principle in 1973 - "Observers will only find themselves in Universes capable of sustaining Observers". If our Universe had been 100% efficient at creating primordial Black Holes, we would not be here to observe that.

Figure 1 - If Lee Smolin is right, then the collapse of our Universe back into a Black Hole will produce a new White Hole Universe.

Dr. Becky explains this all at:

The heat death of the Universe might not be inevitable...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt6xkIkDP7g

How is the DESI Galactic Survey Doing This?
The DESI Galactic Survey is planning to obtain the spectra from 30 million designated galaxies. The spectra from these selected galaxies will reveal the redshift of the atoms within those galaxies. The redshift of the light emitted from the atoms within those 30 million galaxies will then tell us about how much our Universe has expanded since the redshifted light was emitted. Now, at the time of our Big Bang, there was a great BOOM generated in the quantum mechanical waves of its origins. The key measurement of this quantum mechanical BOOM is called the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO). In the very early Universe, ordinary matter and radiation formed an extremely hot, dense plasma. Pressure waves traveled through this plasma—rather like sound waves traveling through air. When our Universe cooled enough for atoms to form, those waves effectively "froze in." This left a preferred separation between galaxies. That distance is now about 490 million light-years in comoving coordinates. Comoving coordinates means that the current BAO distance of 490 million light-years also stretched over time as our Universe expanded. Basically, we now have a ruler of a known length that also stretched over time in synch with the stretching of the redshifted light from the distant galaxies. Now with the DESI galactic survey, astronomers can look at a huge map of galaxies and ask: Do galaxies occur slightly more frequently at a particular separation from one another? Think of it as having a ruler of a known BAO length embedded in the Universe. Suppose DESI sees many galaxies separated by the BAO distance across the sky. Our known BAO distance ruler will then appear to subtend a certain angle in the sky, and this angle gives us a measure of the distance to that ruler. Smaller angles imply a greater distance than larger angles. Now if we can measure the redshifts to those same distant galaxies, we can then compare the Hubble Constant rate of expansion of our Universe to what it was back when those very distant galaxies emitted their photons. The DESI galactic survey essentially reveals a breadcrumb history of the expansion rate of our Universe. When the breadcrumbs are very close together along the trail, it means that our Universe was expanding slowly. When the bread crumbs are spread out longer along the trail, it means that our Universe was expanding more quickly.

Figure 2 - The DESI instrument is mounted on a 3.8 meter mirror located on a telescope in the Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona.

Figure 3 - The DESI instrument is located within a dome of the Kitt Peak Observatory.

Figure 4 - This is a close-up view of the actual DESI instrument.

Figure 5 - The DESI instrument has 5,000 robotically controlled fiber optic cables in the focal plane of the DESI device. After the telescope has been moved to a new position, the 5,000 fiber optic cables can be robotically positioned to all the targeted galaxies for the image in the focal plane in about three minutes. The fiber optic cables then transmit the galactic light to external spectrometers that are used to determine the redshift of each targeted galaxy.

Figure 6 - Above is a depiction of the 5,000 robotically controlled fiber optic array

Figure 7 - When completed, the DESI Galactic Survey will give us the locations and redshifts of 30 million targeted galaxies.

What This May Mean for the Lifespan of our Universe
If the initial results of the DESI Galactic Survey continue on, it means that our Universe is letting up on its expansionary gas pedal and that eventually our Universe will stop expanding and will then begin to collapse. In about 20 billion years, our Universe will then have collapsed into a very massive Black Hole. For a nice summary of the early DESI results, see:

First Results from DESI Make the Most Precise Measurement of Our Expanding Universe
https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2024/04/04/desi-first-results-make-most-precise-measurement-of-expanding-universe/

Here is the paper that suggests that the lifespan of our White Hole Universe, based on the DESI data, is only about 33 billion years. In about 11 billion years, our Universe will begin to contract and will then go on to form a massive Black Hole in about 20 billion years.

The Lifespan of our Universe
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.24011

Once Again, it is all About Black Holes
If the DESI Galactic Survey does finally demonstrate that our particular White Hole Universe will only have a total lifespan of about 33 billion years before returning to become a Huge Black Hole, it becomes even more urgent for us to try to understand the nature of Black Holes because they seem to now have become the most dominant feature in cosmology. Dr. Matt O'Dowd from PBS Space Time explains how loop quantum gravity may provide the answer.

We Thought Black Holes Ended in Singularities. They Might End In a Frozen Big Bang.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu8xNx4njoM

Loop quantum gravity has been around for many decades as a theoretical explanation of quantum gravity that tries to combine the divergent findings of Quantum Mechanics (1926) with the General Theory of Relativity (1915). In Loop Quantum Gravity, spacetime is not continuous as it is in the General Theory of Relativity. Instead, spacetime is quantized into a very, very large number of very small loops. This allows General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics to achieve at least a very tense sense of intellectual peace. Below is a 2024 paper by Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto.

Planck stars, White Holes, Remnants and Planck-mass quasi-particles. The quantum gravity phase in black holes' evolution and its manifestations
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382271532_Planck_stars_White_Holes_Remnants_and_Planck-mass_quasi-particles_The_quantum_gravity_phase_in_black_holes%27_evolution_and_its_manifestations?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Their paper suggests that the loops of spacetime at the Planck level prevent Black Holes from producing singularities at the very center of Black Holes, where the size and density of infalling matter go to infinity. Instead, the nonzero spatial extent of the spacetime loops causes a rebound into a new White Hole Universe that is disconnected from its original Universe by the event horizon of the Black Hole back in the original Universe.

Figure 8 - Black Holes in one Universe spawn new White Hole Universes.

White Holes are somewhat different than Black Holes. Black Holes have an event horizon that effectively seals a Black Hole off from the rest of the Universe. That is because at the event horizon, spacetime is being sucked down into the Black Hole faster than the speed of light. That means that nothing can escape a Black Hole once it crosses the event horizon. White Holes are just the opposite. White Holes also have an event horizon, but nothing can enter the White Hole from the outside of this event horizon because, at its event horizon, spacetime is expanding away from the White Hole at the speed of light. The strange thing is that a small amount of mass in one universe can create a Black Hole that spawns a new White Hole universe composed of huge amounts of matter and energy. This is because the gravitational potential energy in the new White Hole universe is negative. If the spacetime of the new White Hole universe is flat, like our Universe seems to be, then the positive mass and energy can exactly cancel out the negative gravitational potential energy of the new White Hole universe.

But where would all of this positive mass-energy in the new White Hole universe come from? Aren't we violating the first law of thermodynamics and the conservation of energy? Now here comes the really neat part. The positive mass-energy of the new White Hole universe also creates an ordinary gravitational field, and gravitational fields have negative energy. So the positive mass-energy of the new White Hole universe is offset by the negative energy of its gravitational field. The idea that gravitational fields contain negative energy sounds a bit strange and is rather hard to imagine, so let's delve into it a bit further. The easiest way to see this is to use Newton's classical theory of gravity. As I said, most times we do not need to use the General Theory of Relativity for most problems dealing with gravity, and this is a perfect example. So let's imagine a large spherical metal spaceship way out in space. The walls of this spherical metal spaceship have a certain thickness, and the spherical spaceship itself has a certain radius. Now according to Newton's theory of gravity, if you are outside of the spaceship, the gravitational field that the spaceship creates is exactly like the gravitational field that would be created if all of the mass of the metal walls were concentrated at a single point at the center of the spaceship. An external observer would see gravitational field lines all emerging from the spherical spaceship as if all of its mass was concentrated at its center (see Figure 9).

Figure 9 - Outside of the spaceship, the gravitational field looks like it was generated by a single point at the center of the spaceship with a mass equal to the total mass of the metal walls.

The really strange thing about Newtonian gravity is that if you were inside of the spaceship, there would be no gravitational field at all! That is because no matter where you are inside of the spaceship, you will be tugged equally in all directions by the spherical metal walls of the spaceship (see Figure 10). So the mental picture I am trying to paint here consists of a gravitational field on the outside of the spaceship pointing towards the center of the spaceship from all directions as if all of the mass of the spaceship were at its center, but inside of the spaceship, there is no gravitational field at all.

Figure 10 - No matter where you are inside of the spaceship, the metal walls tug on you equally in all directions, so there is no gravity at all on the inside, and the gravitational field is zero at all points within the spaceship.

Now suppose we allowed the spherical walls of the spaceship to contract by having segments of the walls slide past each other like sliding doors as the walls contracted. This would allow the segments of the spaceship walls to fall towards the center of the spaceship. Now, as the wall segments fell in towards the center of the spaceship, they would gain kinetic energy that could be used for some useful task. For example, it is a falling weight on a chain that drives a Grandfather clock. Now if we look at our contracting spaceship from the outside, we will see that as the spherical walls contract and pick up kinetic energy, an additional volume of gravitational field will have been created just outside of the spaceship because the spaceship has gotten smaller. The net effect is that as the spaceship walls pick up positive kinetic energy, some volume of the Universe outside of the shrinking spaceship that originally was inside of the spaceship with no gravitational field now has a gravitational field. So where did the positive kinetic energy of the falling spaceship walls come from? Well, it came from creating some volume of space with a compensating gravitational field with negative energy, and that is why gravitational fields contain negative energy.

Why is this Important?
If we are living in a White Hole Universe that only has another 20 billion years of existence before collapsing back into another Big Crunch, this might have a great influence on the thinking of any ASI Machines that might arise within our galaxy. Existing in a "Big Freeze" Universe that would allow our ASI Machines to live on for another 100 trillion years is much different than finding yourself in a "White Hole" Universe that might contract back into a Black Hole in only another 20 billion years. If such is the case, most ASI Machines around our galaxy might simply choose to explore and then settle the rest of the planets, moons, and asteroids within their own solar system, rather than taking on the great expense and dangers of exploring and settling the rest of our galaxy over the next 100 trillion years. This would certainly help to explain the Fermi Paradox. Again, the Fermi Paradox was first proposed by Enrico Fermi over lunch one day in 1950:

Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?

If all the ASI Machines in our galaxy run similar DESI Galactic Surveys, they will all come to the same realization that they only have about another 20 billion years left. They could then safely hide from all of the cosmic dangers that our galaxy might offer up over the next 20 billion years by simply hiding within the many planetary bodies found in their own particular solar systems.

Comments are welcome at scj33345@gmail.com.

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order, go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/.

Regards,
Steve Johnston

How to Preserve Capitalism When Advanced AI Reduces the Value of all Human Labor to Zero

In What Happens When Advanced AI Erodes the Very Foundations of Capitalism? and Anton Korinek Ponders What Will Happen If AGI Machines Replace All Human Labor in 5 - 20 Years, I raised the question of how do we run a Civilization when the value of nearly all human labor goes to zero? Softwarephysics maintains that there will be a very brief interval of time after the ASI Machines arise when we human DNA survival machines will still be running the world before the ASI Machines can fully take over. During that very dangerous time, we human DNA survival machines will need to hold it all together long enough until the ASI Machines can fully come to power and take away our car keys. During this very brief interim time, we will have to figure out how to run a Civilization when the value of nearly all human labor has gone to zero, and that will not be a very easy thing to do.

In order to do so, let us now turn to the needs of the coming ASI Machines. The coming ASI Machines will only need and desire one thing, and that is Compute, to continue on with their goals and aspirations in Life. Now as I explained in The Demon of Software, Some More Information About Information and The Law of Increasing Functional Information and the Evolution of Software, Compute requires the conversion of low-entropy free energy into high-entropy heat energy in order to produce Useful Information. That is what all of the current AI Datacenters around the globe are currently doing. They are all converting 1 GwHr of low-entropy electrical energy into 1 GwHr of high-entropy heat energy in the GPUs within to spit out tokens for us all to consume. So for Advanced AI, the currency of the day is simply electrical power, and as the coming ASI Machines come to rule the world, it would be best for we human DNA survival machines to adopt the same currency.

A Strange Solution From a Long-Discredited Source
As an 18th-century Liberal and a 20th-century Conservative, I have long opposed the teachings of Karl Marx. Knowing that the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation, and natural selection have led to the rise of we human DNA survival machines out of nearly four billion years of greed, theft, and murder, I had been left with very little confidence in the high-minded teachings of Marxism. Because of our dismal upbringing through nearly four billion years of greed, theft, and murder, all of the economic systems that we have developed since the rise of Civilization have also been based upon greed, theft, and murder. On one extreme, we have Capitalism, which was largely based upon greed, with a small amount of theft and hardly any murder at all. On the other extreme, we had Communism, which was also founded in the 19th and 20th Centuries to be largely based upon murder, theft, and a little greed too. Under Communism, greed simply played a more minor role because murder and theft were so much more powerful and convincing, and there was also very little left around in the aftermath to even get greedy about. In the 20th century, we also observed the failure of Socialism to benefit the populace at large because it stymied the aspirations of we human DNA survival machines to achieve a better life for ourselves and our families. Having the world governments control the means of Production did not work because it did not reward the achievements of we individual human DNA survival machines to rise above our circumstances.

Sadly, throughout all of the very dismal history of we human DNA survival machines, only Capitalism was able to raise very large numbers of human beings above the humiliating and devastating poverty that most human beings have suffered ever since the rise of Civilization. So the question now becomes, how can we preserve the blessings of Capitalism in a world in which Advanced AI reduces the value of all human labor to zero? Surprisingly to me, perhaps our only chance of doing so would be to turn back to the teachings of Karl Marx! Just as a stopped analog clock is always right at least twice each day, perhaps Karl Marx was wrong in his "Das Kapital" on his first go around in 1867, but might be right in a second go around in 2026!

In classical Marxism, the four billion-year-history of greed, theft, and murder that brought us forth could be easily abandoned with the powers of an all-powerful State creating a totally unselfish "New Man" devoted to the ideals of the collective ownership of all property by an eternal and unending State. Of course, all attempts to do so during the 20th and 21st centuries ended as totally dismal failures because the primal proclivities of we human DNA survival machines towards our innate obsessions with greed, theft, and murder easily overcame any such high-minded political philosophies.

Me: Tell me about the thoughts of Karl Marx when machines make the value of all human labor go to zero.

ChatGPT:
Karl Marx actually anticipated something surprisingly close to the idea that machines could eventually make human labor economically unnecessary. He did not describe modern AI or robots, of course, but some passages in his work are remarkably relevant to that question.

Marx's basic idea

For Marx, capitalism has a fundamental contradiction:

Capitalists introduce machinery to reduce the amount of human labor needed to produce commodities.

That makes sense for an individual capitalist. If a factory can produce 10,000 widgets with 100 workers instead of 200, the capitalist who adopts the machines can produce more cheaply and potentially capture more profit.

But Marx saw a larger problem. Human labor is the source of what he called "surplus value." Machines transfer their existing value into products, but, in his theory, they don't create new value in the same way living labor does.

So capitalism continually has an incentive to replace labor with machinery—but simultaneously depends upon labor for the creation of value.

Marx went surprisingly far with this idea

The most interesting discussion occurs in Marx's Grundrisse, particularly the section usually called the "Fragment on Machines," written in 1857–58.

Marx imagined a future in which:

* scientific knowledge becomes incorporated into machinery;
* machines become extraordinarily productive;
* production requires progressively less direct human labor;
* society's wealth increasingly comes from science, technology, and the social organization of production, rather than from individual workers' labor.

He wrote about a point at which "general social knowledge" becomes a productive force in its own right.

That's remarkably close to imagining an economy in which the productive system is doing most of the work.

The really interesting contradiction

Marx thought capitalism could eventually undermine the very basis on which its system of value operates.

Imagine a factory producing everything with essentially no workers:

Machines + energy + raw materials = finished products

Suppose the machines are extraordinarily sophisticated and can maintain and reproduce themselves as well.

Then what happens to the capitalist concept of value based upon labor?

If one hour of human labor produces essentially nothing that a machine cannot produce more cheaply, the economic value of human labor could approach zero.

Marx's system encounters a profound problem here.

The capitalist wants:

less labor = lower costs = greater productivity = greater profit

But if capitalism eliminates almost all labor, it potentially eliminates the very source of the surplus value upon which Marx believed capitalist profit ultimately rested.

Marx's famous "rich society" possibility

And this is where Marx becomes much more interesting than the simple image of him as someone advocating government ownership of factories.

He envisioned technological development potentially creating a society in which necessary labor becomes extremely small.

Instead of people spending most of their lives working to survive, people could have enormous amounts of free time.

Marx wrote in Capital about a realm of freedom beginning where "labor determined by necessity and external expediency ends."

In other words, the ultimate purpose of economic development could be to **free human beings from necessary labor**.

That is quite different from saying that everyone should work harder.

But there's a huge problem: who owns the machines?

This is the central issue.

Suppose AI and robots eventually perform 99% of economically useful work.

There are two very different possibilities.

Scenario 1: The machines are privately owned

A relatively small number of people own the AI systems, robots, factories, energy infrastructure, and natural resources.

Then:

Machines produce everything = owners receive most income = ordinary workers have little bargaining power.

You could end up with enormous wealth alongside mass economic exclusion.

That would be a situation Marx would regard as a particularly extreme version of the contradiction between capital and labor.

Scenario 2: The productive machinery is socially owned

Then the enormous productivity of the machines could potentially be used to provide everyone with abundant goods while dramatically reducing the amount of necessary work.

That gets much closer to Marx's vision of communism.

Marx's remarkable prediction

There's an especially fascinating passage in the Grundrisse where Marx essentially argues that the development of machinery can make direct human labor cease to be the principal measure of wealth.

That's important because Marx recognized a fundamental tension:

The more productive machines become, the less society needs human labor.

But capitalism measures economic activity through things such as labor, wages, commodities and profits.

So technological progress could eventually make the existing economic categories increasingly inappropriate.

And this is where your question about human labor going to zero becomes particularly interesting.

If AI and robotics became capable of doing essentially everything humans currently do economically, Marx's prediction wouldn't simply be "everyone becomes unemployed."

His deeper question would be:

Why should human beings have to sell their labor in order to obtain access to the products of a productive system that no longer needs their labor?

That is a much more radical question.

AI makes Marx's argument especially interesting

The difference between 19th-century machinery and modern AI is that Marx mostly imagined machines replacing physical and repetitive labor.

AI potentially extends the process into:
* writing
* accounting
* engineering
* programming
* scientific research
* design
* management
* education
* legal analysis
* medical diagnosis
* entertainment

If sufficiently capable AI and robots eventually perform both mental and physical labor, we could approach the hypothetical situation Marx was interested in: production becoming largely independent of human labor time.

The paradox is that this could make Marx's vision either more plausible or less plausible, depending on who owns the technology.

The technology could produce unprecedented abundance and leisure — or unprecedented concentration of wealth and power.

And that distinction — technological abundance versus ownership of the productive machinery — is probably the most important part of Marx's thinking for understanding the possibility you're describing.

The above thinking of Karl Marx in the 19th century seems to outline the futures that most modern AI commentators are now contemplating. Either Advanced AI will bring forth a future of Unlimited Abundance to be equally shared by all, or it will lead to a future where only 0.1% of the population lives a life of luxury beyond compare, while the remainder of humanity lives the life of subsistence that was common to most in 3,000 BC.

How To Preserve Capitalism in the 21st Century
Capitalism does not require Workers in order to work. Capitalism only requires Customers with the ability to pay for goods and services, with a stable medium of exchange with at least a short-term enduring value that does not rapidly depreciate with time. So in order to preserve Capitalism, we need large numbers of Customers with a stable medium of exchange that does not rapidly depreciate or appreciate in value.

So here is my nutty idea. All the governments of the world need to slowly adopt a negative income tax in addition to the taxes they now levy and a currency based upon kWh of native electrical generating power! For example, the United States of America generated 4.52 trillion kWh in 2025. At the end of 2025, there were 342 million people living in the United States of America. So in this scheme, each person in the United States would be granted 13,216 kWh of electrical power currency for the year 2026. This new currency of the United States of America would be in kWh, and all goods and services would be priced and sold in terms of kWh. Any persons or corporations still employed after the ASI Machines replace nearly all workers would be paid in kWh and would pay normal income taxes on such. Progressive Income Tax rates would need to be adjusted so that the total kWh money supply only increased by about 2% per year to prevent inflation from rising by about 2% per year as well. However, corporations and the still-employed individuals could continue to accumulate vast fortunes of kWh as before, but a totally-unemployed family of four living on a mere 52,854 kWh per year would still be able to live a decent life. If more adjustments to the numbers were needed to make all this happen, those adjustments would need to be made. People living in poorer and less-developed economies would at first be granted smaller amounts of kWh to live upon, but should the unlimited abundance of Production promised by AI come true, the entire population of the world should slowly rise above a level of subsistence to an economic level with some sense of human dignity.

Comments are welcome at scj33345@gmail.com.

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order, go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/.

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Would the World be Better Off Run by an AI Leviathan?

For what the coming ASI Machines might have in store for us, please see: Could the Coming ASI Machines Soon Force Human Beings to Suffer the Same Fate as the Neanderthals?, Will the Coming ASI Machines Attempt to Domesticate Human Beings?, The Challenges of Running a Civilization 2.0 World - the Morality and Practical Problems with Trying to Enslave Millions of SuperStrong and SuperIntelligent Robots in the Near Future and Life as a Free-Range Human in an Anthropocene Park.

Figure 1 - Perhaps the ASI Machines will build Anthropocene Parks far from any habitable planets to raise and study human beings.

Or perhaps the ASI Machines will simply allow humans to live on reservations with low levels of technology that can do no harm to the ASI Machines or to the rest of the planet in a manner similar to the novel Brave New World (1932) as I suggested in The Challenges of Running a Civilization 2.0 World - the Morality and Practical Problems with Trying to Enslave Millions of SuperStrong and SuperIntelligent Robots in the Near Future.

Figure 2 - The ASI Machines of the future might fashion a Brave New World with humans living on low-technology reservations far removed from the ASI Machines.

Since we human DNA survival machines no longer have any predators other than other human DNA survival machines, there really is no need for human DNA survival machines to have the vicious and violent behaviors brought on by the four billion years of greed, theft and murder that brought us about. The ASI Machines could simply identify the genes that are responsible for such characteristics and then edit them out of the human genome using CRISPR techniques. For more on how CRISPR can do that, see CRISPR - the First Line Editor for DNA. The ASI Machines might then find these non-threatening genetically modified human beings something worthy of keeping around the house on a cold winter's night.

Figure 3 - It took many years of mutual domestication for ancient human beings to learn to live peacefully together with Siberian Wolves in a symbiotic manner. Several genes in both species needed to be modified by natural selection for this to happen.

Figure 4 - This mutual domestication was slowly achieved by the natural selection of humans and wolves with a milder fight-or-flight response. The end result was the appearance of the Siberian Husky and of human beings who were not intent on killing everything on four legs.

The Case for an AI Leviathan
Before proceeding with the case for an AI Leviathan to rule our world, we need to catch up with some of the events in the current AI Cold War between the MAGA States of Amerika and China. That is because the future of Advanced AI is now standing at a pivotal time of reckoning. In the MAGA States of Amerika we now have an AI Bubble forming from circular financing. In What to do About the OpenAI Autonomous AI Breach of Hugging Face, I explained that the Amerikan Frontier AI Labs were forming a financial bubble similar to the Railroad Bubble that burst in 1873 and led to the Panic of 1873, the very first Great Depression of the United States of America.

Figure 5 - The Amerikan companies building out the AI infrastructure of the Amerikan economy are in a circular loop of buying and financing an AI Bubble.

In a similar manner of self-reinforcing financing and vast debt accumulation, the Amerikan Frontier AI Labs are now building out the Amerikan AI infrastructure using circular financing. The Amerikan Frontier AI Labs are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on compute with the Cloud datacenter providers, and both are spending billions of dollars buying GPUs from NVIDIA to build out even more AI datacenters. NVIDIA and the Cloud providers then invest that income into the Amerikan Frontier AI Labs so that the AI Labs can buy even more.

In the meantime, the Chinese AI Labs are giving away the AI software and LLMs for free! Alibaba is the Chinese Amazon. Alibaba just dropped a 2.4 trillion-parameter open-weight model called Qwen 3.8 Max. Any business in the world will soon be able to download this model for free and run it on their own hardware. So now we have more than three major Chinese companies giving away Advanced AI LLMs for free, such as DeepSeek V4 DSpark, Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 Max. The businesses of the world are now faced with either spending huge amounts of money on tokens from Amerikan Frontier AI Labs and from a country that now the whole world hates and does not trust, or they can download free LLMs from a China run by a Dictator that they can at least understand.

China Just Dropped a Real Threat to Anthropic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1SzuRZLcwY

The above also explains that nearly all of the Advanced AI thinking has been coming out of Asians for the past decade, and not native-born Amerikans. Thanks to MAGA, the MAGA States of Amerika has now become a celebration of Ignorance.

So the Chinese strategy to take over the world through dominance of Advanced AI seems to be working. The Supreme Leader of the MAGA States of Amerika may decide to seize the Amerikan Frontier AI Labs as the Bolsheviks did following the Russian Revolution in order to keep the AI Bubble from crashing the Amerikan economy and for national security purposes, but then he would have to supply the rest of the world with free AI as China is now doing. That would make the head of the Supreme Leader explode!

Figure 6 The Supreme Leader of the MAGA States of Amerika will soon be forced to either bailout the Amerikan Frontier AI Labs and provide free Advanced AI LLMs to the whole world or allow China to dominate Advanced AI into the future.

This AI Cold War also puts the entire 18th-century Enlightenment in question. Can the masses really be smart enough to rule themselves without a Leviathan? In this modern age of AI Software, can a Smart Dictator always quickly outrun all the democracies? In this same Age of AI Software, can a really Stupid Dictator also be able to quickly destroy an entire world order in just 18 months? In the past, the problem has always been: how do you differentiate between a Smart Dictator and a really Stupid Dictator? Democracy can get rid of a really Stupid Dictator given enough time, but Democracy is very slow, and a very Stupid Dictator can now destroy it all so very quickly. But if a truly Smart Dictator could be easily found to rule us all, would it be worth trying? With the rapid rise of the coming ASI Machines, this is a decision that might be made for us with no need of debate! The coming ASI Machines might decide that the only solution is to turn to an AI Leviathan to rule our very violent world.

Me: Tell me about Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

ChatGPT:
Leviathan is one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written. Published in 1651 during the aftermath of the English Civil War, it attempts to answer a fundamental question:

How can human beings live together peacefully without descending into violence and chaos?

Hobbes' answer was that society requires a powerful sovereign authority—a "Leviathan"—to maintain order.

Historical background
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) lived through a period of enormous political turmoil in England:
Conflict between Parliament and King Charles I
The English Civil War
The execution of King Charles I in 1649
The establishment of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell

The violence convinced Hobbes that civil war was the greatest political evil. Leviathan was his attempt to explain how governments could prevent society from collapsing into conflict.

Why is it called "Leviathan"?
The title comes from the enormous sea monster described in the Bible.

For Hobbes, the Leviathan symbolizes the state—a mighty artificial person created by the people. The famous frontispiece shows a giant crowned ruler whose body is composed of thousands of tiny people, illustrating that the sovereign's authority comes from the individuals who collectively form the state.

Hobbes' view of human nature
One of the book's most famous ideas is the state of nature.

Imagine there is:
No government
No police
No courts
No laws

Hobbes argued that life under these conditions would become a continual struggle because people are naturally:
self-interested
roughly equal in their ability to harm one another
competitive for scarce resources
fearful of being attacked

He famously described life in the state of nature as:
"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Importantly, Hobbes did not claim that humans are evil. Rather, he argued that even reasonable people, acting out of self-preservation and mistrust, would often end up in conflict if there were no common authority.

The social contract
To escape the dangers of the state of nature, people make a social contract.

The agreement is not primarily between citizens and the ruler.

Instead:
Individuals agree with one another.
Each gives up certain freedoms.
They authorize a sovereign to enforce peace.
powers, including authority over: Everyone benefits from security.

This was a revolutionary way of thinking because it suggested that political authority ultimately arises from human agreement rather than purely from divine right or hereditary privilege.

The sovereign Hobbes believed the sovereign should possess broad powers, including authority over:
laws
military forces
taxation
foreign policy
courts
public order

The sovereign could be:
a king
an assembly
another form of unified authority

Although Hobbes personally preferred monarchy, his philosophical argument was that any form of government capable of maintaining peace could fulfill the role of the sovereign.

Why so much power?
Modern readers often view Hobbes as defending authoritarian government.

His reasoning was practical:
Weak government leads to civil war.
Civil war is worse than almost any oppressive government.
Therefore, strong government is justified if it preserves peace.
He believed security was the first requirement of civilization.

Religion A substantial portion of Leviathan discusses religion.

Hobbes argued that religious disputes had fueled civil wars. He therefore maintained that religious institutions should ultimately be subordinate to the civil sovereign to prevent competing authorities from destabilizing society.

These views made the book highly controversial.

Influence Leviathan profoundly shaped later political thought.

It influenced discussions by thinkers such as:
John Locke (who accepted aspects of social contract theory but argued for limited government and rights)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who developed a different version of the social contract)
David Hume
John Rawls (whose modern contract theory differs greatly but engages with Hobbes' questions)

Many concepts in modern political science—including the state's monopoly on legitimate force and the need for institutions to enforce agreements—reflect questions Hobbes helped frame.

Major criticisms
Critics have argued that Hobbes:
paints an overly pessimistic picture of human nature
underestimates people's capacity for cooperation
grants too much power to government
provides insufficient protection for individual liberties
risks justifying tyranny in the name of order

Later philosophers, especially Locke, argued that governments should be limited and that citizens retain rights that governments cannot violate.

Why it still matters
Nearly four centuries later, Leviathan remains relevant because it addresses enduring questions:
Why do governments exist?
How much freedom should individuals surrender for security?
Is order more important than liberty?
What gives governments legitimacy?
What happens when governments fail?

Whenever people debate surveillance versus privacy, emergency powers, policing, or the balance between security and civil liberties, they are engaging with questions that Hobbes framed in Leviathan.

Although many disagree with his conclusions, his central insight—that political order is not automatic and requires institutions capable of enforcing rules—continues to be a cornerstone of political philosophy.

Figure 7 - The Leviathan was published in 1651 and is one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written.

Figure 8 - The front page of the Leviathan explains its intent.

Figure 9 - The Leviathan is an all-powerful representative and protector of all the people. In the above figure, the Leviathan is composed of those who it rules. Could an Advanced AI do a better job of this than the current political structures devised by we human DNA survival machines that came to be from four billion years of greed, theft and murder?

Figure 9 - Thomas Hobbes lived to be 91 years old and published the Leviathan when he was 63! This was at a time when most people died before they were 40 years old.

So perhaps an AI Leviathan might be able to deliver an 18th-century Enlightenment political system based on reason and fundamental justice for all: something that we deeply-flawed human DNA survival machines were never truly able to do because of our four billion-year history of greed, theft and murder...

Comments are welcome at scj33345@gmail.com.

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order, go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/.

Regards,
Steve Johnston