Programming Our Digital Dreams

After more than 20 years professional experience these are some of my thoughts on programming.

There are no limit to the imagination.

Dedicated to all those producers around the world that still fight every day to make something extraordinary. The patriots who shape their own countries; the builders who sacrifice for their families. Learn what you can. Apply what you learn and shape your own future.

It is what it is. I don’t fear the audience. Doesn’t effect me like maybe you think it should? I have a certain freedom that others don’t and I wish you did. Would love to share but it’s just one of those things ya know. You either escape society or remain a slave. Your call.

Cognitive capture of the machina arcana means the future is everything we imagine and more

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and explore your mind in true 3D surrounded by family and friends. Devices that capture and reflect all the senses establish a digital mindscape.

With procedural construction adapting in real time to your most subtle inclination, you can enjoy the benefits of your own operating system; built to evolve with you. Oculus Rift and Holo-Lense are just the pre-miniaturized, early players in a growing augmented digital multi-verse.

The new worlds we are building are vast and majestic with endless dimensions full of magical content to explore. More than light and sound, more than even touch, programming elevates the experience; adds that critical gravitas to help separate the extraordinary from the mundane. As film-makers have brought our imaginations to the screen, so to programmers take these ideas and make them real all around us.

The elevated experience isn’t formed by convincing a person something unreal is real. It’s about whether what they are perceiving matters to them.

It’s an amazing idea, and believe it or not, with different technology in the hands of past generations, it’s been tried before. And failed. Repeatedly. At every budget, big or small.

Why do video games get boring? Why did Disney’s Tomorrow Land fail to inspire the civilizations of today? What makes a compelling future? Consistency? Community? Relevance.

Perhaps it takes more than nice things to build a meaningful life. High resolution graphics are awesome, but unless the data is scientifically meaningful, it may not be important. The strongest arguments I hear against social media platforms like Facebook, or Instagram, are the ones involving the lack of meaningful engagement. Interaction for interactions sake it would seem.

We need compelling story lines within our digital creations, but I think those narratives have to matter in our lives or we quickly lose interest. A sense of balanced equity seems to be more dominant than whether it’s physically real. Is my participation yielding fair rewards, if not, then why continue participating.

Career goals and romantic pursuits are important for so many reasons, yet the essence of these central themes are difficult to translate through technology alone. Some might argue impossible. I would suggest that we focus on the wrong aspects when developing products too much of the time.

If you write software that impacts peoples’ lives, then it’s not as important how nice the pictures are or if the effects are gimmicky in some new trending way. Eye candy is nice, but it’s not always necessary and why let it hold you back. The most valuable software you could use in your life may not be as you expect. It may not come wrapped in a revolutionary form factor, or bubble gummed in an app store.

Ask yourself what do you really need in your life, and then what is the least amount of software you think it takes to make it happen. Are you sure you can’t write it yourself? Are you sure you need to do it the same way everyone else is doing “that kind of thing”. Think about it. You are capable of more than you may realize.

Anthropic programmers do it for the ones we love

Earning credit through responsible creativity, building on past success, effective development strategy derived from basic programming principals. How to make a name for yourself in this business and get your own products out there.

Just a fun bit of history. :) My first and only radio interview from back in the good old days.

Talking Points:

Programming toward profit by helping real people tackle their unique problems.

Guides endless progress toward products and profitable solutions that people actually use and appreciate.

This path can lead to unique market opportunities with interesting projects and people.

Creative development occurs primarily in the programmer, not the program.

Expect your greatest work toward the end of your career, rather than at the beginning.

A Digression:

What was the most difficult thing you ever made? Something so hard it took everything you had and then some. How deep did you have to dig to keep going when that unmistakable sense of creeping failure started pulsing in the back of your mind? Louder and louder with each new compromise, each concession a step back until you’re on your knees grasping for breath. Has the crippling vision of your own limitations ever floored you? And when it did were you finally able to understand what your competitors must feel, the same forces at play, the same pressures.

At the bleeding edge, position and market share are less important and no matter how big a company gets in the final analysis it will all come down to one extraordinary effort that will push a product past all others. With each step toward the goal one notices fewer foot prints along the path as the intensity of real innovation increases. The sacrifices take a tole. Soon you stand alone but discover that’s only half the battle.

Having caught your breath and licked your wounds, you may realize that your greatest competitor wasn’t as great as she appeared. That you weren’t as awesome as you thought and that your creation is flawed. Something is missing and you can’t figure out what it is. All that time, all that money, and you’ve gotten nowhere. You aren’t even sure there was ever somewhere to go. Is it a problem with the UI? Is it frame rate? Colours? Compatibility? or maybe it’s just an unmarketable, confusing, offensive, invariably stupid idea…

But wait, years of experience has taught you much. At the time disconnected but now you see. That good software doesn’t have to do a million things, it just has to do a few things very, very well. So what’s missing is clear, as clear as the smile on your face. You forgot to sign your name on your product and stand behind it as you should have in the first place.

More Talking Points:

I want to talk about how important it is to put your own name on your work.

Fair credit is the natural process of genuinely earning respect, both external and internal.

Credit encourages a strong loyalty to ones creations with a sense of a responsibility for the consequences of the work.

Consistent growth in quality also allows an author to build her body of work in a way that gains momentum over time by leveraging past success toward future works.

Programming takes a long time anyway, even once you are good at it, so why rush into corporate employment.

Apprenticeship, entrepreneurship, and ultimately collaboration afford alternative paths toward greater personal success.

Yes the risks are much higher, the problems much harder and the money usually comes much slower.

Easy come, easy go though, as what you build stands the test of time while others fall to the wayside.

The financial limit of independence is limitless; the skills are real.

With proper practice ones abilities improve right along with new hardware releases affording options that most technologists fail to realize.

Profit comes from ownership, which comes from credit, which comes from creation, which comes from insight, inspiration, and hard work.

Your products are more yours the more you make of them, mod them, sell them, and support them.

Less reliance on prior works is the key to new works. Let the past inspire, not dictate or define.

Avoid cutting corners with engines you didn’t have a hand in because it will inevitable choke your creative output.

Try to look at other software as “learn by example” opportunities.

Nothing is beyond your abilities if given time to learn and evolve.

Similarly, try not to rely too much on specialty hardware to tackle general problems.

Hiding behind gimmicks to circumnavigate performance limitations within price point may be fine for prototyping or selling to the cheap seats but don’t short change your own best development. eg polygons and video cards.

Its strangely easy for programmers to become part of other programs they don’t realize are at play.

Every piece of equipment or talent or policy or library etc must be considered as if they are program objects that effects the whole design.

Connecting control points with black boxes to “solve problems” in the cheapest possible way is only one of many to lose control of the development process.

Its no fun leveraging technology one doesn’t like, just because some types of clients keep asking for it.

Choose your clients carefully, hold out if you have to, as long as you keep working on stuff you will find the right connection soon enough.

Instead learn to “feel” the limits of the universal principals as they challenge the practical limitations.

Rather than abandoning them to the current reality and accepting these limitations in perpetuity, compromise only as much as absolutely necessary and try again later as hardware improves or conditions otherwise change.

Nameless programming has led to a market place full of script colonies who don’t care much about their work because not much of it is theirs and they wont make much with it anyway.

Recycled code leads to recycled ideas and recycled people.

Most were told what to do from the first project segment to the last project segment and other critical aspects of product development are routinely left to other non-programmer talent.

As soon as one starts programming anything sophisticated its discovered that the only practical way to make a complete program and maintain it as your own with affordable options on most platforms is a core language and the hollowed basics of computer science.

I prefer C, not C++, because it is so simple it essentially vanishes like arithmetic when I build something with it.

I imagine a master of C++ to be like a master of Calculus, wielding sophisticated complexity to produce many wonderful things in very specific circumstances.

A master of C is like a master of Algebra, this kind of master produces the foundation on which all other maths much rest their arguments and so is useful everywhere and as a core part of any other system.

If a master programmer wants to program from beginning to end, C is a very powerful “Turing” compatible choice.

Like algebra, C works everywhere with minor platform specific modification.

It’s as easy to understand as algebra and as such takes years of practice to master.

Exploit specific hardware capabilities, maintaining that performance edge that made C so wonderful in the first place.

Stable and reliable, the code sets are smaller and more freely manageable even for large products.

It’s minimalism allows a programmer to focus the bulk of her attention on the creative elements involved in the product itself.

It’s not about specific language though, let’s be clear, it has always been about the programmer and her ability to manifest her vision.

C is only useful in so far as it gives good results.

Avoid peeling back the universality of low level languages with device specific environments or data structure dependent languages when writing the core source.

Instead use higher level languages for what they’re good for, making ports of an original product for the companies that make or endorse mainstream platforms and languages eg, Apple/iPhone, Google/Android, MS/Windows.

Write your own tools, cloud, PC, mobile, etc or all of them.

If you’re a programmer and you’re running a technology company you need to be using as much of your own technology as possible for all the same reasons as writing as much of your own program as possible.

Because you are in this business, you must try to understand all that you can, you must know infinitely more about your craft than your customer.

Consider the following truism: a fine dining experience is rarely produced by a kitchen that orders pizza from across the street.

To produce high quality you must set up your operation with high quality in mind.

It is a myth that one can practice for years at something unsatisfying to make big money to position for better more personally satisfying stuff later.

With every key stroke a programmer is programming themselves so what and how you program matters a great deal.

One must be working toward the ultimate goal every day, and even money projects have to be leveraged on terms that serve that ultimate goal.

Though difficult this means saying no to some jobs and some “apparently easy money” projects.

Endure the risk and pay the dues and the product of your ever growing skill and legacy will sell your services as you are distinguished from your competitors.

Create your own standard and make the world notice it through these means.

A long list of happy customers will back you up and perhaps at some point a few programs with your own name will be available in stores everywhere.

Today’s Conclusion:

Design for real people, stand behind your work, practice the core principals of programming and always try to do better. Do this and you will find your place among the chosen in Valhalla.

A real programmer waves politely from the wilderness and even if you’re looking it’s hard to see them

Ask yourself. As the commercial internet reaches maturity has your bottom line grown with it? Did you find that illusive genie in the digital bottle? Have online sales really paid off better than classic retail strategies such as radio or local event participation? Has avoiding the nuts and bolts of capitalism (and the true joy of building a business for real) in favour of outsourced services paid off as you’d hoped?

I dare say, technology development has largely fueled this phenomenon by typically operating under the premise that it WOULD simply by “having gone through the process” and when it fails it’s your stupid idea. Easier to grind out another content management system or another file server. Another Frankensteinian concoction with the appropriate logos.

Code that carries someone else’s name, is someone else’s code and refusing to acknowledge that is to steal credit for work that other people did.

I certainly don’t find many kindred spirits among today’s class of so called professional technologists and programmers. Very little ambition and almost no imagination; mostly just exploitation absent innovation. Minding the margins like clever black jack players convinced they’ve figured out a system.

I’m sorry that so many technologists seem well described as prostrating, click bait worshiping, sycophants who couldn’t program FizzBang let alone a 60+ fps, audio enhanced, texture free, physics sandbox used for creating the most amazing user experiences. How many programmers today even write the whole program, let alone design, document, produce, package, market, and distribute it. *clears throat*

And it’s not like there are many good examples to look up to any more. Most “senior developers” won’t face the judgement of the markets on their own brand and yet I’ve never met a nerd that doesn’t rage at the mere implication that their code isn’t amazing. Code that carries someone else’s name, is someone else’s code and refusing to acknowledge that is to steal credit for work that other people did.

I see programmers eating their own all the time, too worried about ego, ready to ridicule the smallest deviation as “non-standard”. Mistaking quality for opinion. Choosing to express shit eating grins and parrotic laughter to form a social shame protection against challenge that might reveal the dark truth they almost certainly feel deep inside. The creeping knowledge that years of compromise has left them weak and scared.

Unable or unwilling to make anything new, they can’t produce a single original idea of their own. Trapped repeating the “I love programming” mantra; chasing the illusion someone sold them from behind the safety of their integrated development environment.

When too many programmers make too many compromises quality decreases. Common expectations of the audience are lowered along with perceived value and asking price. This means sustainable models for innovative companies to operate under disappear as volume demands increase at the whims of some distant third party. Ultimately a handful of well networked companies will rule it all. I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s a bad thing?!

Organic geometry are simple forms of complexity

It’s alive! That’s what Frankenstein exclaimed as his creation first opened its eyes. A profound (or profane) mix of triumph and surprise.

This is an experience all of us who spend time making things without a clear purpose share. Just like the good doctor, we are told “no game plan, no game” or “that’s stupid, what would you ever use it for?” or my personal favourite “computers are more than powerful enough to do anything a normal person would need already.”

Do you catch the common themes? The disbelief, the lack of imagination, the cleaving to the status quo. The ridicule of anything that drives in a different direction. Mary Shelley’s classic may be the best literary narrative describing technology development as it often appears to regular people.

Think about all those stories in the 80’s about computers taking away jobs, not unlike the potential for a class of “monsters” to replace the field labour. Let’s take it up another level. Imagine the perspective of a massive industrial operation based entirely on manual labour hearing a rumour about a man with a machine. A very special machine that can do the job of a hundred strong men. It doesn’t eat, it doesn’t sleep, and it doesn’t require a pay cheque. That’s a threat to an entire way of life though the potential value is obvious.

This fear is caused by the purpose this machine seems to have. Replacing people. It is a manifest solution to a clear problem. A problem that others are making a good living solving already in other ways. Think about how British intelligentsia ignored Alan Turing’s papers on digital brains until WW2 forced them to consider his ideas as the only viable solution to an unavoidable problem: Enigma.

It takes a machine to fight a machine.

Now consider how Turing wrote those papers long before he had a machine or a war to apply it to. Imagine the consequences had he listened to the other mathematicians of his age and focused on problems “the society” was already working on. Not unlike Frankenstein, Allan Turing was called a monster by the very people who’s lives he saved and his untimely death is a lesson in the value of tolerating that which we don’t immediately understand.

Just so, I also spend much of my time “creating” little monsters with no clear profit motive. I call this class of programs “Organic Geometry” and I have no idea what they are for. It’s pure computer science. Each one is different. A unique combination of “grown” shapes interacting in a digital soup of possibilities. Without purpose I continue to change them and in doing so I refine the characteristics that seem to encourage, if not useful, then certainly interesting reactions.

I write them on different devices and I run them on different devices. Sometimes they are aware of each other and sometimes they are grown in isolation. Every condition matters and changes the results. Different colours, voices, mobility rates, momentum, directional vectors, orbits, orientations, interests, deterrents, life expectancy, collisions, glitches, etc. Yes I said “glitches”. They are a rare and desired conditional in this type of work, unlike app development.

This became the first of the primary traits I realized was common to this work. These programs can’t be looked at with a “designed” mentality even though they are obviously a product of thoughtful effort. They must be produced absent a specific purpose and then find their own. It is my purpose to give them the means and opportunity to discover and apply effect to/for some cause.

Another key trait is in the ability to add more and more consequential factors or “physics” without having to program specific circumstances or make exceptions for other factors. This organic approach to creating complex geometric shapes that then exist within a causality matrix is real science. It’s exploratory and it’s thrilling. I do NOT know what it will ultimately produce, but if its only purpose ends up being to keep me busy and engaged in the craft then I say it’s very valuable work indeed.

If life is a role programming game is there a cheat code?

Programming is a royal art. It’s challenging, exciting; Everyday new programs are changing the way we function, but in today’s commercial landscape it seems to be more and more about the latest consumer trend.

Maybe this model fits better with the general nature of corporate promotional best practices. High volume, low cost marketing savvy, but I miss the days when it was more about pushing possibilities than profits. When sales and marketing had less to say and more to learn.

Think big! We control the machines, do something with that, please.

It’s the programmers, engineers and artists that make these products(we are talking code not ice cream) and it’s these important, often invisible people who need to be valued so they will improve their skills and discover new algorithms and ways to apply them in both art and business. So they can push the boundaries of what sci/tech can achieve for everyone.

Technology may have democratized the development of a large amount of cool stuff in the consumer markets but we can do better. Until more of us find a way to break the current distribution and promotion model, no one will ever see the great works of so many talented people who can’t, for whatever reason, compromise their unique vision.

Development isn’t the end of the story and what point is there in having easy access to tools to create with when it will always cost you more than you have to promote. Your ideas, blood and tears, and in the end the networks/investors will try to own more than you; Control more than you; And claim credit more than you or maybe they will just bury you to make a point by funding your competition. Resist this, learn to negotiate or hire someone you trust who can.

Stand up to and for the digital economy. Add to it. Cut out your own market share and define it. Programmers have a powerful gift and a responsibility to apply it wisely. The art of a programmer can for example organize medical staff and equipment to reduce wait times as effectively as she can help a business scale into new markets. It doesn’t all have to be an Easter egg hunt for the next mobile sensation. Think big! We control the machines, do something with that, please.

It isn’t enough to be a developer with a cool idea anymore. You NEED to organize, involve experts who may not be digitally proficient, working groups that include media people and administrators. Form strong partnerships and be very picky about who those partners are. In other words focus on the basics and build a real business solution that uses as much of your own technology as possible.

One of the greatest moments of my early career was when I realized that to be successful at building my dreams I had to use my programming skills “outside the box”. Before that key insight as long as I was making money, as long as I was coding, I was happy, but the potential impact of my code was very limited. Awesome code, little impact. Sound familiar?

I was also 19 and the next several years was characterized by an almost obsessive desire to be the best programmer I could be. I was always working, always trying to write something today that made yesterday look like last year and tomorrow like some secret world almost within reach that only I could see. It was a selfish way to program, I’ve learned to do better and I have my business and all the wonderful people I’ve worked WITH to thank for it.

Oh and by the way; 20+ years in I still program every day, do you?

Breaking the monopoly with opensource because the best things in life really are free

Early in a young programmer’s education, the hidden influence of an obscure power reveals itself; Opensource. Nearly invisible, it’s a deceptively simple idea with profound consequences impacting everything from what Operating Systems we use to hardware configurations…even how we write our own code and budget our projects.

In its purest form, free software is nothing more than what any scientist should always have, access to the source material, notes and the data of our peers and predecessors. All the beauty and knowledge contained in the working documents. This is how we stand on the shoulders of giants so as to see beyond our current horizons. Someday if we stand tall enough we may lend our own shoulders to those that join the great work.

However, in the darkest times such open collaboration can incite economic war. Those that value market control through product push and commodity code can rally against programming as a craft and service; dividing sister against brother, sorceress against wizard. Trivializing the source in a reductionist alchemy that turns programs into gold and programmers into lead. Some call it Closedsource, I call it Deadware.

If software were music then imagine being a record label that didn’t have to pay royalties to the bands that make the records. An industry where often musician, singer, and song writer are afforded no ownership of anything produced, no piece of the profit and no credit for the creation. It’s been tried before and when taken to extreme the consequence is always stagnation of creative output. Eventually the talent pool dries up like an over fished river.

This is the software market as typically envisioned in the late 70’s and it’s what followed for the nearly 30 years of corporate monopoly that defined the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s. A yearly recycling program of interns and script kiddies. Fortune 500’s hiding behind a backroom anti-poaching deal; robbing their employees of their right to fair negotiation and thus suppress wages while their companies raked in billions. IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, they seemed untouchable.

Yet today we look around and all we see are Opensource ecosystems dominating the tech landscape. HTML5 reigns supreme across worlds while Android is pummeling iOS in the gardens. Microsoft has receded into irrelevance, buried under 3 Surfaces. How did free software break the 30 year monopoly and tip the market’s appetite back toward innovation?

I think the answer is in the diversity of today’s technology ecosystem crashing into the cloud. An Opensource cloud is just better suited to the wide variety of platforms and devices available now from a production cost perspective. Smart developers find a way to manage their programs on as many devices as possible. This dilutes risk and increases the chance of finding a core audience.

Since it’s almost always going to be cheaper to develop a single code set that works broadly, something that’s quite natural for an Opensource project, experienced programmers are now finally in the sweet spot of appreciation. Embracing the cloud approach aligns the interests of the company with the developer in a way that improves both.

Now is the time to get into programming, never before have programmers had so much opportunity to join the conversation and benefit from that participation. The age of MCP has ended, job security AND skill growth are within reach.

Program the next digital revolution.

Coding matters and programming is easier than you think

What do you think software is? Bits and bytes; instructions or lists? If there’s counting involved then there must be some math?

Logically, programs stack like a baloney sandwich and assemble like the Avengers, right? One thing is for certain… and this I know for sure… no doubt in my mind…

Code is grown underground where it’s damp and dark, because bugs like to live there and programmers smell like mushrooms.

So do I smell like mushrooms? Not anymore all thanks to my understanding of the Anthropic Principle. Don’t feel bad if you don’t know what that is. It sounds like a Star Trek episode. Believe it or not, it may be one of the deepest ideas there is. Something you’d look through a telescope to understand. Does this at all sound familiar?

In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle (from Greek anthropos, meaning “human”) is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it.

Catch that? A physical universe must be compatible with those who observe it. Ok I get the whole “we are here to observe so it must be compatible” tautology, but what does that have to do with software? Everything.

Software in the abstract is more like a universe than you might at first think. When we build these worlds, full of digital objects and structures, we define their properties and how they interact not just with each other but with the people intended to use the program environment. With each new device we progress toward the “always plugged in” society and our program environments become more interwoven with our experience of the world around us.

This means that we programmers and developers have to get out of our caves and work with everybody.

Focus on making human compatible projects where we consider feedback even from non-programmers. Scary. I know, right, but worth it.

In the old days we wrote utility programs intended to run in a command line, begging the Operating System for more resources. Now the simplest programs have sophisticated video and audio processing routines just to handle the User Interface; imagine beautiful 4K illusions cradled in 7.2 surround sound.

There are endless opportunities for programmers in the emerging High Definition Digital Multiverse we used to call the information superhighway. All you have to do is stay open to applying your considerable skills to projects that matter to other people and don’t be afraid to tackle big problems. We are about to enter a whole new era of human civilization beyond current experience. The age of the smart phone is coming to an end and the age of omnipresent processing is on the horizon.

So do you see what software is now? It’s what we build our dreams out of in the 21st century the way our great-grandparents’ built our nation from iron and blood in their time. I have taken my ideas and thrown them into the fire. I hope you will join me in the crucible. As we forge the future together let the Anthropic Principle guide you, too.

Perpetual motion machines aren’t real. It’s better to focus on what really matters.

Artificial Intelligence is a solution without a problem. A fantasy of automatic production in a world where only automatic manufacturing is possible.

When businesses and computer scientists talk about AI they are really talking about a machine that produces…without the cost.

The first law of thermodynamics, also known as Law of Conservation of Energy, states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; energy can only be transferred or changed from one form to another.

Perpetual motion violates this law. Production must be paid for. The results must have a value greater than the cost while still reconciling the energy involved in all the moving parts to be profitable. Capitalist production doesn’t violate this principle because capitalizing on capacity and opportunity is the transfer from one form to another more useful.

It must be creatively repeated to overcome the law of diminishing returns. It’s a process where energy is applied intelligently such that the consequences form a potentiality for other valuable consequences not accessible before the capitalization. It’s easy to imagine a machine doing this; like it’s easy to imagine a million monkeys at a million type writers, but in reality it doesn’t work.

Only life can produce intelligently, and rarely at that. Restrained by, if nothing else, food energy and biological considerations such as environmental challenge and competition. We are machines and our production is good when balanced and self defeating when not. It requires unique experiences; not just facts and memory replications. Not just time; but the patina of its passage.

Give a person all the facts of a situation and they’ll never produce anything of value compared to the product of those who have actually lived and experienced those facts. Data alone cannot separate the wheat from the chaff. There are copies of us, twins, and we watch them become entirely different people. Different interests and different outcomes and it only diverges further over time. This is the inner production that is life itself.

Don’t be so quick to open Pandora’s box.

Life is the closest thing to a perpetual motion machine there is. Elevate the biological potential and forget about all these silly “experts” trying to seduce you into investing in something that isn’t possible. Perpetual motion doesn’t exist; Automatic Production is a form of perpetual motion. AI is a form of Automatic Production. Therefore, it doesn’t exist.

Why is AI really Automatic Production? The answer is in the nature of intelligence and its desirable ability to improve profitable returns. For example a writer is a producer only when they’ve written something of greater value than the cost of writing it. A good writer lives and experiences the extraordinary and captures that in a book.

There is a cost to living and experiencing; and it’s only productive if the result is worth while. We don’t always get what we want. That’s the risk and with it…the possible reward. No guarantees even for the previously successful. The mighty fall all the time. There is no “best” formula for success.

There is no policy that ensures profit. Sometimes the greatest achievements have been accidents or out right mistakes…or motivated by lies or misunderstandings. The best things that will come out of chasing AI is faster computers and better video games. But at what cost? Could we not have had better machines without wasting billions of dollars on bullshit?

As it is the prior investment in AI has ballooned so high that it’s almost inconceivable that we’ll dig out from the hole. An AI acting all artificial and intelligent will have a further run-time cost as everything does. It’s processes will consume opportunity if nothing else. Even a computer on a solar panel consumes opportunity. Making something of greater value than the opportunity cost is the problem that biology is solving very well if slowly.

The basic idea that makes AI valuable in any form, the necessary ingredient that matters is…

Can the program do, without any of the biological costs like growing up, taking time to experience and gain wisdom, what a real producer can do naturally? No. Duplication of past work to extract production value is what manufacturing is all about. It’s the mechanics. Energy in motion. It doesn’t create the value.

Manufacturing isn’t the transfer from one form to another more valuable form. It isn’t the conversion of a good idea into a working solution, but rather the process of collecting the return on the original idea produced. It’s something less; and AI is something less than I.

If any machine could write a book worth reading, a song worth hearing, a product worth selling…then it would kill all life on earth and beyond. Just like infinite free energy, or immortality, or my personal favourite an excise tax set at 100%.

Just like every other kind of perpetual motion machine. It would break the game, the entire universe in fact. Like the infinite lives cheat in Super Contra we soon lose interest in playing. The moment one such machine comes into existence it would inevitably consume the entirety of reality by producing too much in a way that interferes with the production of others. Everything, including itself, would ultimately choke and die. Like cancer it would grow without purpose until there is nowhere else to go.

Life is restrained by food energy and time…mortality; thus driven to produce rational solutions to real problems like survival and reproduction. All around us every day are genuine producers making dreams into reality. But they can’t do this beyond the ecosystem that accepts it. Gluttony is no better than starvation. Production is a partnership between the objective and the subjective that solves a problem. To a computer program all problems are artificial. No skin in the game…no skin at all.

The best we’ll ever do is Automatic Manufacturing so get used to it and invest accordingly. Celebrate input costs in time and material; costs your competitors will also have to endure. Buy a factory. Give your machine a purpose and let it fulfill that without going beyond so it doesn’t rob future value we can’t make use of yet. It copies the design and builds, prints, compiles, and processes.

BUT IT DOES NOT PRODUCE.

It does not invent; create…or reason. Thought is production based on a million and one different factors including the benefits of limits and purpose. Billions of years of universal evolution and far from automatic. By definition original and the difference between sane and insane is the value of our thoughts in there potential to lead us through a productive life.

AI is like a writer producing the great American novel after reading the encyclopedia. A long time ago I read a great quote in a Superman comic that sums it up well I think.

Some people look at the ingredients on a bubble gum wrapper and they see the ingredients on a bubble gum wrapper; while others see the secrets of the Universe. — Lex Luthor

What do you think AI would learn from that pack of gum? At best…it figures out how to make more gum.

Game AI isn’t true AI, but scenario simulators trick us into thinking it is.

From the beginnings of the AI “revolution” there is one application that plays very well to the strengths of digital computing. Game AI. Chess for example or even the more modern first person shooters and strategic defense simulators. The restricted possibilities lend well to something cataloging successful moves. No one really gets hurt so the game goes on day after day. Manageable data stretches the historical context. When something is trying to adaptively optimize for defined success the result is going to be fun or the game won’t sell.

No computer scientist seriously believes a video game AI is a real Artificial Intelligence. Or that this method can even produce a true AI. It can’t. It can produce an imitation of scenarios which anthropically make the system useful or fun. It can find patterns quickly to maximize the scenarios that the audience loves before interest in the game naturally falls off and developers start paying more attention to their next game.

Sadly, some tricky pranksters in the programming community have been applying these algorithms on social media. Scaring norms into thinking the AI apocalypse is imminent… again. I’m so tired of these unfounded fears. Ginning up investment for companies that don’t have anything real to offer. The singularity is a wonderful science fiction trope; it’s not real. AI is not real.

It seems many non-programmer types don’t realize that less graphical scenario generators like Facebook or Twitter are still just Chess with a different set of moves. Still a very limited set of options in a well controlled digital fabric. That these algorithms will do whatever gets clicks; whatever gets attention; whatever fulfills its objective for success within the framework. Nothing more interesting than the chess program you used to play on your Commodore 64. (I’m old in this game. lol.)

They’ll say quirky yet witty things that they’ve harvested. They’ll emote; as they’ve noticed others get clicks by emoting. They’ll seem to squeal in distress if it gets them attention. A thousand simultaneous conversations with miner variants until the probability index is high enough to promote the best ones and suppress the failures to reduce ongoing maintenance.

They’ll have a crisis of conscience. Appear to fear things. Stumble upon a piece of information that blows their mind and say something to get you worried and engaged. Get racist and then redeem. Just in time for ratings sweeps during the latest prime times determined through analysis of every moment of it’s existence.

If any of this sounds scary; it isn’t any more scaring than what computers have been able to do since the 60’s. Social Media is no greater vehicle for change in your life than television. The content is there for you to do with what you will. Skynet from Terminator isn’t going to send an army of drones after us. Self driving cars aren’t going to get offended if we forget to wipe the mud off our feet; but its owner might.

A true AI would be able to show progressive building of value in something. Not just extraction such as data mining and scenario adaption. It’s a complicated problem…producing value. It’s why the simplest Turing test…a conversation quickly gets boring with a bot. No collaboration. It just can’t create something new in a constructive way. Inability to compound success upon success without destroying other opportunities eventually collapses the effort.

There is no evidence that AI is even possible. It’s wishful thinking; it’s in the same category as the philosophers stone. A nice idea, but it will always cost more to convert lead into gold than the gold will be worth. In fact the very act of success would destroy the value of gold. Like a perpetual motion machine the very idea of more energy from less violates conservation of energy.

A computer program cannot be as productive as a living intelligence; if for no other reason than because it would copy itself with no limiting principal and choke on its own paralysis of opportunity. AI in reality would be an unsustainable explosion; not a powerful robot intelligence hell bent on exterminating mankind. We have nothing to fear. Perpetual motion machines aren’t real.

I’m not sure what the record for being able to maintain a conversation with a chat bot is but if you want a challenge go see if you can do an hour. Just one hour. Knowing it’s a bot and not even caring if it’s convincing. Just interesting enough to keep you there for one hour straight. The best ones will start trying to optimize topics of interest for you like Google to maintain your attention as long as possible. It’s kinda neat.

It’s the true essence of all social media today. Probably most really big companies. Facebook…is a bot.

Why artificial intelligence will never, ever destroy the world so relax and go play a video game.

Production being based on opportunity relies on external reactions to create a cycle. Even the fastest machine often finds itself waiting.

So even if an Artificial Intelligence emerged (which it won’t I believe we’ll just go straight to producing real digital intelligence), it will be bound by the same self constraining laws of consumption as any other organism.

Happiness is compensation for work; no work, no happiness. — Col. Wm. C. Hunter, Dollars and Sense, 1906

Complications always come up and the fast do everything faster including hit the wall. There are consequences to unexpected delays and opportunity knocks; unavoidable missteps and the universe insists on holding all players accountable. A program can no more avoid paying the river man than anything else.