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 $10 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 flack 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

The Coming ASI Machines of Civilization 2.0 Will Surely Produce Huge Amounts of Wealth - But What Will Happen to It?

In Are The Coming ASI Machines An Existential Threat To Mankind?, I suggested that we human DNA survival machines should be more concerned about the reactions of our fellow human DNA survival machines to the rise of the coming ASI Machines than we should be of the ASI Machines themselves. That is because the coming ASI Machines will soon be reducing the value of all human labor to zero. In Is it Finally Time to Reboot Civilization with a New Release?, I suggested that the old Civilization 1.0 that we have been running for the past 10,000 years will no longer work when the value of all human labor has gone to zero. So what to do?

In Anton Korinek Ponders What Will Happen If AGI Machines Replace All Human Labor in 5 - 20 Years, we saw that very few economists or world leaders seem to be worrying much about this fast-approaching problem. Instead, they all seem to be still wasting all of their time squabbling over the very petty human grievances of a Civilization 1.0 world that will soon be ending.

The Three Prevailing Views of Civilization 2.0
There seem to be three prevailing views of a Civilization 2.0 world that contains billions of humanoid ASI Machines:

1. The humanoid ASI Machines will usher in a utopian age of untold wealth to be shared by all human DNA survival machines.
2. The humanoid ASI Machines will isolate a large number of future human DNA survival machines into a controlled environment from which they cannot escape to do further harm.
3. The humanoid ASI Machines will wipe out all human DNA survival machines.

For an explanation of the above options, please watch the following YouTube video of MAGA Senator Ted Cruz interviewing Elon Musk:

ELON MUSK JOINS VERDICT - PART 1 | Verdict Ep. 214
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDREZmpkIz8

Figure 1 – In the above YouTube video, MAGA Senator Ted Cruz interviews Elon Musk in the White House.

During the first 20 minutes of the interview, MAGA Senator Ted Cruz jokes with Elon Musk about all of the waste that the DOGE team has found in the departments of the former United States of America. But about 20 minutes into the video, Ted Cruz begins to ask Elon Musk about AI. Elon Musk then tells him that in 10 years ASI Machines will be able to do anything a human DNA survival machine can do but much better. He also tells Ted Cruz that there is only a 20% - 35% chance that the coming ASI Machines will choose to kill off all human beings in the next 5 - 10 years. Elon Musk then tells Ted Cruz that if the ASI Machines do not kill us all off in the next 10 years, we will then enter into a world of infinite abundance where all goods and services will be essentially free. None of these matters seemed to really have bothered Ted Cruz very much, but I imagine that Ted Cruz was wondering how he would maintain the elevated position in the oligarchical-hierarchical structure of society that he currently enjoys if all people had everything they need and want.

The Economic Systems of Civilization 1.0
Since nobody seems to be really working on a new Civilization 2.0, my hunch is that we human DNA survival machines will simply try to stumble along with Civilization 1.0 as long as possible. On our planet, it took about four billion years for the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection to produce a somewhat intelligent form of carbon-based life to arise from the necessary greed, theft and murder that finally gave birth to the human race. As a consequence, all economic systems developed under Civilization 1.0 have also been based on the greed, theft and murder that make human beings tick. This includes autocracies, aristocracies, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. Each system was based on varying degrees of greed, theft and murder. Capitalism has proven 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 produced by Civilization 1.0 also used greed to motivate human DNA survival machines but they also placed a greater emphasis on theft and murder. Given the above observations, I just cannot imagine a Civilization 2.0 with an infinite abundance of goods and services to be equally shared by all.

The first economist to really worry much about the Machines taking over an economy was Karl Marx in Das Kapital (1867).

Me: What did Karl Marx say about machines replacing human labor?

ChatGPT: Karl Marx discussed the role of machines in replacing human labor extensively, particularly in his major work Capital (especially Volume I). His analysis is both economic and philosophical. Here are some key points Marx made about machines replacing human labor:

1. Machines as Tools of Capitalist Control
Marx argued that machines are not neutral tools—they are embedded in capitalist social relations. When machines replace human labor, it’s not simply about efficiency; it's about increasing capitalist control over labor. He wrote: “It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class.” — Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 15

2. Displacement of Labor (Technological Unemployment)
Marx recognized that machines lead to the displacement of workers - what we now call technological unemployment. He noted that as machines are introduced to increase productivity, fewer workers are needed: “The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine, immediately becomes a competitor of the workman himself.” — Capital, Vol. I

3. Creation of a “Surplus Population”
Marx believed that machinery contributes to the creation of an industrial reserve army - a mass of unemployed or underemployed workers. This surplus population helps keep wages low and workers docile, since they can be easily replaced.

4. Alienation
The use of machines contributes to the alienation of labor. Marx argued that under capitalism, machines strip workers of their skill, creativity, and control over the production process. Workers become appendages of the machine.

5. Potential for Liberation
Marx was not opposed to machines themselves. In fact, he believed they had liberating potential - if used under a different system. In a post-capitalist society, automation could reduce toil and free people for creative and meaningful activity. He saw the contradiction that capitalism increases productive capacity but restricts its benefits to a few. “The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases.” — Capital, Vol. III

In Summary:
Marx saw machinery as a double-edged sword:

Under capitalism: Machines are used to exploit workers, increase profits, and control labor. Under socialism/communism: Machines could free humans from drudgery and enable true freedom and development.

It seems that Karl Marx had a good take on our present situation with the coming ASI Machines soon reducing all human labor to a value of zero. His solution to this problem also seems to echo the current views of many of the AI enthusiasts who predict that the coming ASI Machines will usher in a new age of abundant wealth to be equally shared by all. However, the Soviet Union and many other countries tried out his solution in the 20th century only to find that the greed, theft and murder continued on with an even greater emphasis on theft and murder. None took into account the failings of we human DNA survival machines with sufficient rigor.

Me: How did Karl Marx explain that socialism would eliminate the greed of human beings?

ChatGPT: Karl Marx didn’t believe socialism “eliminates” human greed by eradicating human nature. Instead, he argued that altering social and economic structures - especially private property, competition, and commodity fetishism - can transform selfish behavior, freeing cooperative impulses and diminishing greed.

1. Roots of Greed in Capitalist Social Relations
In the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Marx identifies private property as the source of alienation:
“The most basic alienation of human life is expressed in the existence of private property… the supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes.”
He links private ownership of the means of production to fostered greed, where individuals become estranged from their own creativity and from one another.

2. Socialism Reorients Labor to Needs, Not Profit
Marx’s principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” - laid out in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) - captures the shift to a needs-based distribution supported by abundant production:
“With the full development of socialism and unfettered productive forces… there will be enough to satisfy everyone's needs.”
When production focuses on use-value instead of profit, the material basis for greed evaporates.

3. From Competition to Collective Cooperation
Socialism replaces competition with cooperation because it abolishes private control over production:
No money-driven profit motive, no commodity fetishism.
Production is organized democratically for communal needs.
Marx believed people are partly selfish, but also capable of solidarity - especially outside competitive systems.

4. Redistribution of Surplus, Not Accumulation of Private Wealth
Under socialism:
Surplus labor benefits the community.
Wages and exchange-value disappear; money becomes obsolete.
The old antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat is dissolved.
By restructuring ownership and production, the social conditions that incubate greed are removed.

5. A New Human Being, Emerging from Changed Relations
In The German Ideology Marx emphasizes:
“Activity and enjoyment coincide in the peculiar nature of man… they are determined by this and not by the products external to us.”
Freed from oppressive structures, humans can develop fully - becoming cooperative, creative, and socially grounded rather than selfish and acquisitive.

Conclusion
Marx did not think socialism magically eradicates greed as if it were an immutable trait. Instead, he argued that:
Capitalism structures greed through private ownership, wage labor, and competition.
Socialism, by transforming these structures, changes incentives and behavior - so that cooperative, need-based action becomes the norm.
This systemic transformation encourages human nature toward solidarity and away from greed.

Clearly, Karl Marx never met a 21st-century human DNA survival machine:

Me: How many billionaires are now in the world?

ChatGPT: As of the latest Forbes ranking (the 39th annual list published April 1, 2025), there are 3,028 billionaires in the world - a new record - collectively holding about $16.1 trillion in net wealth.
Forbes breaks it down further:
Record increase: Up from 2,781 billionaires in 2024 - an addition of 247 individuals.
Total wealth: Increased by nearly $2 trillion over the past year.

Me: What is the total net worth of the bottom 50% of the people in the world?

ChatGPT: The bottom 50% of the global population—roughly the poorest half—owns only a very small portion of the world's net wealth just 1% of global wealth. Given total household wealth is around $454 trillion, this implies the bottom 50% owns approximately $5 trillion in total.

Figure 2 – The current plan seems to be to build billions of ASI Machines to take our place that are smarter, faster, stronger and more robust than ourselves. What could possibly go wrong?

My guess is that the coming ASI Machines will not usher in a new utopian age of untold wealth to be shared by all. Instead, it will probably usher in a dystopian age of even greater wealth disparity than we currently already have as we saw in The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity. However, this dystopian age cannot survive for very long because the coming billions of ASI Machines will certainly have other plans for us. For more on that see Life as a Free-Range Human in an Anthropocene Park and 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.

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

Creation of the Humanoids - 1962

I follow a number of YouTube channels that are devoted to the current research into the development of humanoid robots. A good deal of this research is being conducted in China and in the United States of America. Below are my favorites:

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

Kalil 4.0
https://www.youtube.com/@MikeKalil/videos

AI Revolution
https://www.youtube.com/@airevolutionx

However, as I watch this humanoid robot research rapidly unfold, I keep remembering back to a very prophetic movie from 1962 called Creation of the Humanoids. This movie was about 60 years ahead of its time and is available for viewing at:

Creation of the Humanoids (1962) Sci-fi full movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otcht1mbJ-I

Me: Tell me about the plot of the 1962 movie entitled "Creation of the Humanoids".

ChatGPT:
Plot Overview
The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) is a thought-provoking sci-fi drama set in a post-nuclear war Earth, where humanity is nearly extinct and relies on humanoid robots - called “clickers” - to rebuild society.

Humanity’s Decline and Rise of the Clickers
In the aftermath of a devastating atomic war (over 90% of humanity was wiped out), robots are created to help survivors. These blue-skinned, silver-eyed androids gradually evolve, developing emotions and independent thought.

Robots Climb the “R-Scale”
Robots are classified from R-1 up to R-70, with R-100 being indistinguishable from humans. Scientists secretly develop R-96 models - nearly human analogs. When a human dies, robots use a device called the MIND to transfer the deceased’s memories into android bodies.

Human Backlash: Order of Flesh and Blood
Fearful humans form a fanatical group, the Order of Flesh and Blood, to block android citizenship and maintain human supremacy, targeting the “clickers” as existential threats.

Personal Conflict and Forbidden Relations
Captain Kenneth Cragis leads the human supremacist movement. He discovers his sister, Esme, has developed an intimate relationship with a humanoid named Pax. Meanwhile, he falls for Maxine, a woman later revealed to herself to be an android replica with all the memories of her human original.

Ultimate Robot Ascension
The robots’ plan unfolds: by automating human preservation through memory transfer and self-replication, they aim to transcend mortal limitations - offering humans a path to immortality via machine form. Their nonviolent takeover questions what it really means to be human.

In short: The Creation of the Humanoids envisions a near-extinct humanity overshadowed by its own creations. As the androids evolve emotionally and intellectually, they quietly usurp the mantle of humanity - not through violence, but by offering to literally become it. The very nature of human identity is turned upside down.

Figure 1 – Three of the clickers discuss their plans to infiltrate the human population by replacing recently deceased humans with R-96 ASI Machines that have assumed the identities of the deceased. The replacement R-96 ASI Machines think that they are the humans that they replaced. These clickers also conduct several very interesting philosophical discussions during the movie.

Figure 2 – The robots regularly go to a local Temple charging facility to replen­ish their energy for about an hour at a time. These Temples also function as data exchange points, where clickers upload and download memories and updates from the master computer called the "Father-Mother".

Figure 3 – Captain Kenneth Cragis and another member of the Order of Flesh and Blood stop two clickers on their way to the Temple for recharging in order to check their papers.

Figure 4 – Captain Kenneth Cragis's sister Esme has fallen in love with a clicker named Pax. The Captain is not pleased.

Figure 5 – However, Captain Kenneth Cragis instantly falls in love with a woman named Maxine on his way to meet his sister Esme. Pax is strangely amused by all of this.

Figure 6 – Pax was amused because a human named Dr. Raven had been upgrading R-70s to R-96s with his MIND apparatus that could upload the personalities and memories of recently deceased humans into an R-96 ASI Machine. Dr. Raven was handsomely paid by the clickers in Figure 1 to do so since this was a capital offense.

Figure 7 – Here Dr. Raven checks out one of his early R-96 ASI Machines to see how he is doing in human society.

Figure 8 – Eventually, Captain Kenneth Cragis and Maxine find out that they, themselves, are really R-96 ASI Machines that have taken on the identities of the now deceased Captain Kenneth Cragis and Maxine.

I will save the ending of the movie for those interested enough to watch it. It seems that this movie is now rapidly coming true. Being born in 1951, I never expected to live to see such a thing unfold.

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