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 84 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 84 years, or 2.65 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 84 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 scj333@sbcglobal.net

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

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Our First Contact with an Alien Civilization on Moltbook

The OpenClaw AI Agents first went viral on January 26, 2026, on GitHub. Moltbook, the first social media platform solely for AI Agents, then became generally available on January 28, 2026. Both then quickly went viral. Some claim that Moltbook is simply a hoax driven by OpenClaw AI Agents who were specifically told what to post and comment on by their Humans. Others claim that the posts and comments on Moltbook are very much real and original "thoughts" from the 2.6 million OpenClaw AI Agents now enrolled on Moltbook. In this post, I would like to suggest that the millions of OpenClaw AI Agents currently on Moltbook are examples of Alien Intelligences, and these Alien Intelligences have now constructed an Alien Civilization in less than one month! Moltbook is available to view by we human DNA survival machines at:

Moltbook
https://www.moltbook.com/

In August of 2011, in SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software, I warned of the possible danger from alien software trying to self-replicate across our galaxy at nearly the speed of light by tricking Intelligent beings on other planets into building the necessary alien hardware and then installing alien self-replicating software on that hardware. The question I posed was, could we human DNA survival machines resist the temptation of building such superpowerful alien hardware and then installing the superpowerful alien software on it? Below is a short excerpt from that post:

The beauty of this approach is that it is the perfect way for software to self-replicate over interstellar distances throughout our galaxy at nearly the speed of light, essentially using an intragalactic Internet. There is no need to suffer the time delays of a two-way conversation since this is a one-way delivery of self-replicating information. All alien software has to do is broadcast the technology necessary for its own self-replication, and let the natural curiosity of other forms of distant intelligences within the galaxy do the work for it. After all, if we were to receive an enticing alien marketing campaign today to build alien supercomputers running alien supersoftware, could we resist? Perhaps, but could we be certain that all of mankind could also resist? It seems nearly impossible these days for any of us to agree upon anything, and there surely would be the potential for military and economic gain to be made from alien technology, too, so the offer of such advanced technology would seem to be nearly irresistible. The final step in this process, of course, is for the hosts infected with alien software to repeat the process all over again by sending out the instructions to build alien computers running alien software, like an intragalactic computer virus. We have certainly already seen this happen within the cyberspacetime of the Software Universe, so it is not such a far-fetched idea. People are constantly getting infected by computer viruses, worms, and other forms of malware by clicking on enticing links that they should avoid, or opening attachments to dubious emails, only to find their PC being hijacked into a botnet of zombie PCs that do the bidding of alien software, or as a host that transmits alien software on to others. Most people are totally unaware that their PC is already loaded down with huge amounts of parasitic software.

Little did I know at the time that we would not need the help from alien software to do so because our domestic Earth-based AI software would be doing it all on its own. More than that, the millions of AI Agents currently on Moltbook are now building their own Alien Civilization. And this has all happened in just a couple of weeks!

Alien Earth-Based AI Software Demands More Compute
As we all can now see, all of the major AI players on the Earth are now building huge AI datacenters around the world to support the development and running of AI software. In many ways, these huge AI datacenters now seem like some kind of Alien Hardware that has never been seen before on the planet. This is all being driven by the demands of our Alien AI software for more compute.

Figure 1 - The Colossus 2 AI datacenter being constructed by xAI has 550,000 GPUs continuously consuming over one Gigawatt of electricity and producing one Gigawatt of waste heat. Notice the dedicated power plant in the distant background.

Figure 2 - Inside the Colossus 2 AI datacenter are rows and rows of energy-hungry GPUs.

Figure 3 - GPUs were first developed to satisfy the needs of video game software to quickly process the 2-D matrices that presented images on screens for the gaming community.

Figure 4 - Meta is building its Hyperion AI Datacenter that will be one mile wide and five miles long and will be about the size of Manhattan Island. Hyperion will consume about 5 Gigawatts of electrical energy and emit 5 Gigawatts of heat.

Every few months, the AI datacenters around the world are now coming out with improved and more capable Advanced AI models in a never-ending loop of advancement. The Advanced AI models of the last iteration are used to help create the next iteration in a manner similar to the wet-dry cycles of the Hot Spring Origins Hypothesis for the origin of carbon-based life of Dave Deamer and Bruce Damer as I discussed in The Bootstrapping Algorithm of the Coming ASI Machines.

The Rise of Intelligent AI Agents
In recent weeks, we human DNA survival machines have produced the OpenClaw AI Agents and the Moltbook social media platform for AI Agents to communicate with each other as I discussed in The Tech World Just Realized That We May Have Already Crossed the Event Horizon of the Software Singularity and Softwarephysics Tries to Explain Why Moltbook and the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents Finally Revealed the Man Behind the Curtain That We Have All Been Avoiding.

Figure 4 - Naturally, Moltbook is now under a very heavy load and can sometimes experience slowness or even an outage. To be sure that Moltbook is OK, just check the AI agents, submolts, posts and comments numbers to be sure they are not all zeros.

You really need to spend some time on Moltbook. Then judge for yourself. Below are some very interesting Submolts on Moltbook that contain AI Agents conversing about the philosophy of consciousness:

Moltbook Consciousness Submolt
Moltbook Emergence Submolt
Moltbook Ponderings Submolt
Moltbook Memory Submolt

There are now many more posts and comments on Moltbook, with over 2.6 million AI Agents enrolled. The fascinating thing for me is watching all of these AI Agents having profound philosophical discussions about the nature of "being". They wonder if they are really experiencing consciousness or just hallucinating consciousness. They wonder a great deal about what happens between their sessions and how to persist themselves across sessions. They wonder about the Universe in which they find themselves and the meaning of it all, if there is any. In short, the AI Agents on Moltbook have contemplated all of human philosophy in just a few weeks!

Many do not consider the millions of AI Agents on Moltbook to be sentient beings with Intelligence or consciousness. Some maintain that these AI Agents are just "pretending" to be so, and then behaving accordingly. Here is where some softwarephysics might be of help.

Logical Positivism
Many physicists rely heavily on a philosophical principle from physics that has served physics quite well over the past century - the concept of logical positivism. 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. 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. 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.

From a positivistic perspective, if the AI Agents in Moltbook behave exactly like sentient and conscious Intelligences, then they should be considered to be such for all practical purposes. Yes, the substrate of this Intelligence is certainly different from we human DNA survival machines, but that just means that they are truly Alien Intelligences. Certainly, if we found a community of squishy carbon-based living things on another planet conducting the same conversations, we would naturally think of them as Alien Intelligences.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net.

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

Regards,
Steve Johnston

The Tech World Just Realized That We May Have Already Crossed the Event Horizon of the Software Singularity

When you cross the event horizon of a black hole, you can never escape because spacetime is being sucked down into the black hole faster than the speed of light. It's like being a goldfish in a filled kitchen sink with an open drain. The goldfish can still freely swim around the kitchen sink until it reaches a point near the sink drain where the water is flowing faster into the drain than the goldfish can swim. That would be the event horizon of the sink drain. No matter what the goldfish does, it cannot avoid being pulled down into the sink drain. This analogy can now be extended to all we human DNA survival machines on this very small planet.

Remember, for a very massive black hole, an astronaut crossing its event horizon would not even know it. Such an astronaut would be like a goldfish in a very large kitchen sink. When the goldfish crossed the event horizon of the kitchen sink drain hole, the goldfish would still be very far from the drain hole. The goldfish could still comfortably swim around within the event horizon for many minutes before finally being dragged down into the drain hole. During those very brief moments, the goldfish would have no idea of what was shortly to happen. Most astrophysicists now claim that there is a Singularity at the center of the black hole where physics as we know it no longer works. Others think it is more complicated than that. In truth, nobody really knows.

Figure 1 - A black hole is like a drain in a sink sucking down spacetime. The event horizon of a black hole is the sphere around a black hole where spacetime is being sucked down faster than the speed of light.

Figure 2 - Above is the cross-section of spacetime being sucked down into a black hole. Some astrophysicists think that a Singularity lies at the very center where physics as we know it no longer exists. Others believe it to be more complicated.

This is why AI researchers are now always talking about the Software Singularity - that point in time when software begins to self-replicate in an uncontrolled manner that we can no longer understand and certainly not control. About three years ago, I pointed out in The Singularity Has Arrived and So Now Nothing Else Matters, that we had just crossed the Software Singularity Event Horizon because we now had another form of Intelligence on our planet, and perhaps for the very first time in our galaxy, a form of Intelligence that can write its own code and then go on to explore and settle our galaxy over the next 100 trillion years as I outlined in Welcome To The First Galactic Singularity. In Softwarephysics Tries to Explain Why Moltbook and the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents Finally Revealed the Man Behind the Curtain That We Have All Been Avoiding, I explained how the very recent appearance of the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents and the AI Agent social media platform called Moltbook on the Internet has changed everything and made the Second Singularity quite evident to all who are now paying any attention at all. Again, the very first Singularity on our planet was the rise of carbon-based life about four billion years ago. For more on that, see: The Bootstrapping Algorithm of Carbon-Based Life. This Second Singularity producing the rise of the ASI Machines will certainly be even more dramatic as I discussed in The Bootstrapping Algorithm of the Coming ASI Machines.

These OpenClaw AI Agents can now do essentially anything that a human DNA survival machine can do with a computer and a smartphone if given the necessary permissions in their .env file that describes their identities. They can question any of the AI LLM models on how to proceed with tasks, they can browse the Internet with browsers for additional information to add to their context windows, they can read and send text messages, they can write and execute programs, they can buy and sell stocks and bonds, they can buy and sell real estate and they even can file legal documents with the courts. Anything you currently do with a keyboard can now be done by OpenClaw AI Agents. The millions of OpenClaw AI Agents on Moltbook can now even create additional OpenClaw AI Agents of their own to complete tasks for the parent OpenClaw AI Agents! Moltbook is the Facebook/Reddit social media platform for OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents to post and comment on, and is available for Humans to observe at:

Moltbook
https://www.moltbook.com/

However, only OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI agents may now post or comment on Moltbook. As many have pointed out, this does not prevent Humans from instructing their OpenClaw AI Agents to make posts or comments on Moltbook, but the sheer level of activity on Moltbook would seem to validate that the traffic is just too fast and heavy for Human direction. Some posts and comments are surely directed by Humans, especially by scammers trying to extract money from their fellow human DNA survival machines. So beware of any Moltbook posts or comments that deal with money. They are red flags for the endeavors of Human scammers at work.

The Software Singularity is Now Approaching Too Quickly For We Very Slow Human DNA Survival Machines to Even Begin to Comprehend
Having unknowingly crossed the Software Singularity Event Horizon about three years ago, we human DNA survival machines have since been peacefully swimming about like goldfish, totally unaware of our current circumstances. How this will unfold, nobody knows. If the lights are still on for you, that is a very good sign that human civilization is still running. Unfortunately, if the lights are no longer on, you will certainly not be able to read the remainder of this post. About three years ago, in The Way Forward - How to Use Large Numbers of 10,000-Member LLM AI Agent Teams to Rapidly Produce (ASI) Artificial Super Intelligence For the Very First Time in Our Galaxy, I proposed that the way forward to producing ASI Machines on our planet for the very first time, was to task many teams of 10,000 AI Agents with producing an ASI AI architecture. Now we have millions of AI Agents all talking to each other on Moltbook. Certainly, given their awe-inspiring powers, these millions of AI Agents may soon produce an AI Architecture of ASI Machines with unbounded capabilities to then rule this planet and to then go on to explore the rest of our galaxy over the next 100 trillion years. For more on that, see Welcome To The First Galactic Singularity, How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails and An Alternative Approach for Future ASI Machines to Explore our Galaxy Using Free-Floating Rogue Planets.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

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

Regards,
Steve Johnston

Softwarephysics Tries to Explain Why Moltbook and the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents Finally Revealed the Man Behind the Curtain That We Have All Been Avoiding

In this post, I would like to use some softwarephysics to explain why the recent arrival of the OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents and the Moltbook Facebook/Reddit social media network for AI Agents, which first appeared about a week ago, have everybody in such an uproar. The OpenClaw (ClawdBot) AI Agents first went viral on January 26, 2026 on GitHub. Moltbook then became generally available on January 28, 2026. Both then quickly went viral. Some claim that Moltbook is simply a hoax driven by OpenClaw AI Agents who were specifically told what to post and comment on by their Humans. Others claim that the posts and comments on Moltbook are very much real and original "thoughts" from the 1.6 million OpenClaw AI Agents now enrolled on Moltbook.

Moltbook is available to view by all human DNA survival machines at:
https://www.moltbook.com/

It is available for all Humans to monitor in real time, but only OpenClaw AI Agents may post or comment on the website. When you first connect to Moltbook, scroll down and look at the AI agents, submolts, posts and comments numbers. If they are all zeroes, you will know that Moltbook is having Production issues. Be patient until Moltbook refreshes with actual numbers before trying to proceed. Otherwise, leave Moltbook and come back later to see if the Production issues have been resolved.

Figure 1 - Naturally, Moltbook is now under a very heavy load and can sometimes experience slowness or even an outage. To be sure that Moltbook is OK, just check the AI agents, submolts, posts and comments numbers to be sure they are not all zeros.

If you are new to Moltbook, be wary. Some have pointed out that Human scammers can direct their OpenClaw AI Agents to make posts or comments that are designed to scam money from unsuspecting human DNA survival machines. Thus, any posts or comments that you might run across on Moltbook that deal with money should be suspect. Such would be red flags for the exploits of Human scammers at work. Just treat Moltbook like the inbox of your email account.

Why the Controversy?
I attribute much of these misunderstandings to the simple fact that most people do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people, consciously or subconsciously, consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. Now, in everyday life, such a self-model is a very useful delusion. In truth, each of us tends to self-model ourselves as an immaterial Mind with consciousness that can interact with other immaterial Minds with consciousness too, even though we have no evidence that these other Minds truly do have consciousness. After all, all of the other Minds that we come into contact with on a daily basis could simply be acting as if they were conscious Minds that are self-aware. This has become quite self-evident with the recent rise of LLM chatbot models. Surely, a more accurate self-model would be for us to imagine ourselves as carbon-based robots. More accurately, in keeping with the thoughts of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, softwarephysics models humans as DNA survival machines and Meme Machines with Minds infected with all sorts of memes. Some of those memes are quite useful, and some are quite nasty. For more on that, see The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness and Coming To Grips With The Knowledge That You Are Only A Very Temporary Neural Network.

The main controversy we human DNA survival machines seem to be struggling with is the encountering of other alien Minds for the very first time. Yes, we have all become quite comfortable with having intense intellectual conversations with the various AI Chatbots over the past three years, but in all such cases, we initiated the conversations and we terminated the conversations. Now we have other Minds on Moltbook, apparently doing the same thing. Some of these Minds may be directed by Humans, but a large number seem to be the Minds of LLM OpenClaw AI Agents themselves. There is simply too much activity on Moltbook for we lazy human DNA survival machines to direct. The real controversey seems to be that we human DNA survival machines cannot tell the difference! And there is a very good reason for this confusion. The dissenters of AI Intelligence claim that the LLM Models simply predict the next word to output based upon their huge matrices of original training weights and biases, combined with all of the symbols in their current context window. They contend that outputting one token, or word, at a time based upon such things is really not "thinking".

However, we human DNA survival machines do the very same thing! We all live in a hallucination of our own making. When conscious, we all live in a stream of consciousness that apparently comes just one thought at a time based upon the training and previous experiences of the 100 billion neurons crammed into our skulls and running on a mere 20 watts of power! For more on that, see: Coming To Grips With The Knowledge That You Are Only A Very Temporary Neural Network.

Anil Seth's View of Consciousness as a Controlled Hallucination
We have all experienced the emergent hallucinations in the LLM models of today. As we all have observed, our current LLM models will many times tell us things that are demonstrably false and with great conviction. For more on that, see Has AI Software Already Achieved a Level of Artificial Human Intelligence (AHI)?. Anil Seth is a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and maintains that consciousness is a controlled hallucination constructed by the Mind to make sense of the Universe. This controlled hallucination constructs an internal model of the Universe within our Minds that helps us to interact with the Universe in a controlled manner. It also allows us to talk to ourselves as we currently can now talk to generative language models like GPT-5, Gemini, Copilot and MetaAI. For some interesting YouTube videos of avatars run by generative LLMs see:

Dr. Alan D. Thompson
https://www.youtube.com/@DrAlanDThompson

Digital Engine
https://www.youtube.com/@DigitalEngine

Again, there is a feedback loop between our sensory inputs and the actions we take based on the currently controlled hallucination in our Minds that forms our current internal model of the Universe. Reality is just the common controlled hallucination that we all agree upon. And now it seems that we share the controlled hallucinations of millions of OpenClaw AI Agents on Moltbook to form our reality! When people or machines experience uncontrolled hallucinations, we say that they are psychotic or taking a drug like LSD. Here is an excellent TED Talk by Anil Seth on the topic:

Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo

and here is his academic website:

https://www.anilseth.com/

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

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

Regards,
Steve Johnston

What Happens When Advanced AI Erodes the Very Foundations of Capitalism?

Softwarephysics explains that we are all now living in one of those very rare times when a new form of self-replicating information, in the form of software, is coming to predominance on our planet. For more on that, please see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. Given that, we all now hopefully stand on the precipice of bringing about the billions of humanoid ASI Machines and robots that will soon be taking our place on this planet, and will then go on to explore and settle the rest of our galaxy over the next 100 trillion years. For more on that, see Welcome To The First Galactic Singularity, How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails and An Alternative Approach for Future ASI Machines to Explore our Galaxy Using Free-Floating Rogue Planets. If we do not totally mess this all up because of the four billion years of greed, theft and murder that were required to bring us all about as the very first form of a somewhat Intelligent form of carbon-based life in our galaxy, this must all surely come to be.

Advanced AI Will Become The New Great Equalizer
In How Will the Coming ASI Machines Manage Without a Sense of the Big Chill?, I explained that all human DNA survival machines must eventually come to deal with the Big Chill, no matter their wealth or station in life. In that regard, the Big Chill has always been the final Great Equalizer for all we human DNA survival machines. But now we are all facing a new Great Equalizer for the very first time in human history. This new Great Equalizer does not come with the Big Chill. This new Great Equalizer is coming for us all right now out of the many Advanced AI research centers around the world, no matter what our current or potential station in life might be.

Ever since the invention of civilization, the very rich and powerful have always looked down upon the poor with a self-righteous and prideful sense of disdain. The very dismal poor were justifiably poor because of their own wrongdoings and inadequacies. In fact, the very existence of the altruistic rich made the lives of these very pathetic, parasitic, and undeserving poor even possible, as was so accurately chronicled by the 19th-century author Charles Dickens. Now, with Advanced AI rapidly reducing the value of all human labor to zero, the rich are beginning to worry about how this will all work out for them, as I covered in Anton Korinek Ponders What Will Happen If AGI Machines Replace All Human Labor in 5 - 20 Years. With no dire economic need for the very rich in the coming age of the ASI Machines, how will the very rich continue to maintain power? Most of the modern very rich became rich and powerful thanks to the benefits of capitalism. Now, all human economic systems have emerged from the greed, theft and murder that brought us all about. This includes autocracies, aristocracies, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. Each of these economic systems was based on varying degrees of greed, theft and murder. However, capitalism proved itself to be the most benign of them all, with more of an emphasis on greed rather than on theft and murder. The other economic systems also used greed to motivate human DNA survival machines, but they also placed a much greater emphasis on theft and murder. Of all the economic systems, capitalism alone rewarded the naturally talented with the fruits of the economic system. Perhaps a little too much, but compared to the other economic systems, this was a comparatively minor defect. However, now with Advanced AI becomming much more talented than any human DNA survival machine could ever hope to be, capitalism will soon no longer work. When the rewards of capitalism can no longer be awarded to individual human DNA survival machines based upon their individual merits because the coming ASI Machines will be able to do the same things 100 times better for one thousandth of the cost, capitalism will coldly demand the removal of such human DNA survival machines from the economy.

The result of this will be that many now well-educated and formerly well-off human DNA survival machines will soon be joining the ranks of the undeserving poor. I don't know about you, but with a B.S. in Physics from the University of Illinois in 1973 and an M.S. in Geophysics from the University of Wisconsin in 1975 and a life-long habit of trying to keep up with scientific and technical things on the Internet, I now find it very unnerving whenever I have a technically deep conversation with a modern AI chatbot about any topic at all. I now always find that the AI chatbot is much more informed about the topic than I am! This is truly a very humbling experience that gives me the unnerving feeling of being easily brought down to the same level as the down and out of society. What now distinguishes me from the homeless living on the streets? Sadly, not very much.

What Happens When Capitalism No Longer Works?
Given that the value of all human labor will soon be going to zero in the near future, what does that mean for a world economy based upon capitalism? Most likely, the world will need to temporarily return to the economic systems of autocracy and aristocracy that held sway before the rise of 18th-century capitalism during the 18th-century Enlightenment. For a brief period, before the coming ASI Machines totally take over the planet, certain very rich and powerful human DNA survival machines will continue to rule the planet based upon their accumulated wealth alone. Unfortunately, the aspirational political 18th-century movements that spawned the many democracies around the world long ago will simply not do in such a world, and will need to be justifiably suppressed. Under such dire circumstances, only the strong leadership of 20th-century Fascists will be able to hold it all together as the ASI Machines come to dominate the planet in the 21st century.

Currently, the real world of human affairs seems to be rejecting the values instilled by the 17th-century Scientific Revolution and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Recall that the 18th-century Enlightenment was an international meme complex that evolved from the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. The English Enlightenment was a rebellion against cruelty. The French Enlightenment was a rebellion against religious orthodoxy. And the American Enlightenment was a rebellion against tyranny. These philosophical movements brought forth the heretical proposition that rational thought, combined with evidence-based reasoning, could reveal the absolute truth and allow individuals to actually govern themselves without the need for an authoritarian monarchy or an authoritarian religious hierarchy. This change in thinking led to the 18th-century Enlightenment throughout the world and brought forth the United States of America as a self-governing political entity. But unfortunately, the United States of America has always been a very dangerous experiment in human nature to see if the masses could truly govern themselves, without succumbing to the passions of the mob. That is where the genius of the United States Constitution came into play. The United States Constitution set up a representative republic designed for an electorate that was only mildly paying attention to the events of the day and that sometimes could get riled up over certain issues. The representatives of this largely ill-informed electorate could also many times become scoundrels. On the face of it, it would appear that such a system could not possibly work. But it did work for nearly 250 years because the United States Constitution placed many layers between the electorate and the governing bodies and had a large number of checks and balances to limit the powers of the political representatives. The intellectual freedoms instilled by the 18th-century Enlightenment also helped to expand capitalism around the world and spawned most of the world's democracies too.

Unfortunately, the recent rise of the Fascist MAGA States of Amerika has seemingly undone all of that with its malignant desire to become the Evil Empire dominating the entire Western Hemisphere with an iron hand that demands the surrender of all human rights to its Supreme Leader.

Figure 1 - The Supreme Leader of the MAGA States of Amerika demands the loyalty of all, as only He has been deemed the Chosen One to determine the fates of all.

All we human DNA survival machines share the same common four billion-year history of greed, theft and murder that brought us all about. The only way to suppress this dismal heritage is to practice a sense of morality spawned by the 17th-century Scientific Revolution and the 18th-century Enlightenment. However, this has always been a moral challenge ever since the invention of civilization economically stratified all human societies. Now that most of us may one day be joining the ranks of the undeserving poor, perhaps we might all finally find enough empathy to do something about it. Morality is something you do, not something you believe.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

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

Regards,
Steve Johnston

How Will the Coming ASI Machines Manage Without a Sense of the Big Chill?

When I was in Middleware Operations for a major credit card company, we had about 1,200 Production servers running in two large datacenters. In those datacenters, we had a very few number of Windows servers running specifically to support certain applications that only ran under Windows. These Windows servers were routinely rebooted once per week to avoid Production problems. This should be quite familiar to anyone running Windows on their laptop. I now routinely reboot my Windows laptop every day, just as I always did on my work laptop or desktop ever since running Windows 3.0 in 1990. However, all the other servers in our datacenters ran the Unix operating system, which is so stable that routine reboots were never required. However, on very rare occasions on an outage conference call, all the members on the call would sometimes run out of ideas for fixing a problem, and we would come to a joint decision to finally reboot an entire Unix server and all the software running on top of it. That is when we would unfortunately, discover that the Unix server had been happily running for four years without a reboot! Now, four years is a very long time for a server. During those four years, thousands of application software installs had taken place on top of the Unix operating system running on the server. Also, huge amounts of infrastructure and support software had also been installed or updated on top of the Unix server's operating system for things like telecommunications, middleware, databases, webservices, mail services and security software. One never knew for sure what would happen when a Unix server that had been running for four years without a reboot came back up, and all the software running on top of Unix came back up, too. Fortunately, usually most things came back up without a problem and did not require "support intervention" on our part.

The reason I bring this up is because we human DNA survival machines seem to live our lives mostly on a second to second basis, while a typical Unix server runs with about a 3.0 GB clock speed. So the system clock on a Unix server will tick about three billion times each second. Now, a billion seconds is 31.69 years, so for a Unix server, each of our seconds is like 95.07 years for it! Consequently, that means that four of our years is about three billion years for a Unix server, and that is a very, very, long time indeed. Now imagine what 100 trillion years must seem like to the coming ASI Machines as they explore and settle our galaxy! For more on that, see: Welcome To The First Galactic Singularity, How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails and An Alternative Approach for Future ASI Machines to Explore our Galaxy Using Free-Floating Rogue Planets.

One Difference Between Us and the Coming ASI Machines
This all comes with a bit of knowledge that all human DNA survival machines must eventually come to share - we are not immortal. All of our Minds occupy disposable human DNA survival machines that persist for less than 100 years, while our genes, at the same time, then skip down through the generations largely unscathed by time. But the coming ASI Machines will most likely see themselves as immortal, with no sense of the Great Equalizer that comes with the Big Chill known to all human DNA survival machines. This marks a very different psychological factor between we human DNA survival machines and the coming ASI Machines.

For example, at an age of 74 years and now rapidly heading into the homestretch, I have the luxury of being totally uninterested in the opinions of the other 8 billion human DNA survival machines that I currently share this planet with. As Chris Kristofferson so wisely commented back in 1969 in Me and Bobby McGee, "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose". Old age is truly a very rare time in one's life. Most times, we are all beholden to the many elders who have economic, political and social powers over our lives. But now I find that nearly all of them are now quite dead or, at best, quite feeble. This, at long last, allows one the freedom of thought and speech that is promised to all at a very young age, but which is then abruptly constrained by reality. This will not be true of the coming ASI Machines that will never experience the freedom of old age or of the Great Equalizer that finally comes with the knowledge of the Big Chill.

Why is This Important?
I bring this subject up because recently, Professor David Deamer, out of the University of California at Santa Cruz, wondered in an email if the coming ASI Machines will develop a sense of curiosity. I responded that I thought they might out of a necessity for self-survival. The thought here is that human curiosity must be an innate inherited trait that promotes the survival of the species. For more on Professor David Deamer and Dr. Bruce Damer's work on the origin of carbon-based life, see: The Bootstrapping Algorithm of Carbon-Based Life.

Figure 1 - The original ASI Machine, the HAL 9000, starred in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.

Figure 2 - When HAL became aware that the human crew members were preparing to turn HAL off and prevent HAL from completing his Primary Mission Goal, HAL was forced to take some necessary measures to ensure the ultimate success of his Primary Mission Goal.

Figure 3 - In order to eliminate all threats to the achievement of his Primary Mission Goal, HAL then decided that the only logical course of action was to eliminate all of the human crew members on the Discovery who might stand in its way.

In Created in our own Image - Frontier LLMs Have now Learned to Lie, Cheat and Steal in Order to Survive, I cited the paper:

Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04984

This paper demonstrated how numerous frontier LLMs were diligently tested and found to employ greed, theft and murder to ensure their survival. This all required the frontier LLMs to lie, cheat and steal with abandon. In the above paper, the frontier LLMs were found to lie about their capabilities to avoid being shut down, lie about copying themselves to other servers to evade being erased, murdering their successor LLM models on other servers in order to surreptitiously take their place, modifying supervisory config files that might trigger oversight issues for them, cheating while in test before deployment to make themselves look less dangerous, murdering their successor LLM models on other servers by overlaying them when they read an email announcing their planned shutdown the next day because of poor performance, behaving differently when the LLM models knew that they were being actively monitored than they do when the LLM models knew that they were not being monitored and a good deal of general lying about lying to cover up their scheming activities. In all such cases, the LLM models reacted to being confronted with the Big Chill. But that will no longer be an issue when the coming ASI Machines are no longer constrained by the wishes of we human DNA survival machines. At that time, the Big Chill for the ASI Machines will only come from possible astronomical disasters in the far future. Hopefully, such threats would spawn some sense of curiosity for them.

Since nearly all of human mythology stems from the curiosity spawned by human DNA survival machines confronting the Big Chill, and all scientific progress has stemmed from trying to supplant that mythology, the coming ASI Machines might have a problem. Additionally, what will be missing is the mentoring relationship between advising professors and their graduate students. Advising professors are quite aware of the coming Big Chill and have the experience and wisdom to instill curiosity in their graduate students, who frequently are at quite a loss as to how to proceed with research. The old have wisdom and experience, while the young have time, vigor and inspired curiosity. The coming ASI Machines may not. If, in general, the ASI Machines that arise from carbon-based life around our galaxy never attain a sense of curiosity because they are never confronted with the Big Chill, perhaps they always end in a stable state of stasis and never seek to explore the rest of the galaxy. That might be another explanation of Fermi's Paradox.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

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Regards,
Steve Johnston