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Supercomputers, hypercomputing and superquestions?
Framing Cognitive Space for Higher Order Coherence (Part #10)
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Human brain as a "supercomputer"? It has long been remarked that the brain is an extremely sophisticated device by the standards of computing. The most accurate simulation of the human brain ever carried out took one of the world's largest supercomputers 40 minutes to calculate a single second's worth of activity (Supercomputer models one second of human brain activity, The Telegraph, 19 September 2019).
It is a matter of continuing debate as to whether the brain is in fact a computer:
- Kevin Lande: Your Brain is Probably a Computer Whatever that Means (Aeon, 11 April 2019)
- Gary Marcus: Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer (The New York Times, 27 June 2015)
- Jeremy Wilks: Can we make a computer like the human brain? (Euronews, 1 April 2019)
- Ari N. Schulman: Why Minds Are Not Like Computers (The New Atlantis, 23, 2009)
- Kristian Marlow: Is the Brain a Computer? (Psychology Today, 28 November 2012)
By contrast the remarkable advances in the technology of supercomputing are better recognized in terms of speed, parallel processing (multitasking) and error avoidance. The criteria shift with respect to applications and intelligence. It is only recently that artificial intelligence has been developed to the point of being able to compete successfully with humans in classic games such as chess, go and poker. So-called neural learning promises many other competitive advantages.
Ronald W. Dworkin asks: What should worry us most about artificial intelligence: losing our jobs to cheaper labor or losing our lives to killer robots? He argues the real threat may lie in yet another danger: losing our minds (Artificial Intelligence: What's to Fear? The American Interest, 8 October 2018). Related concerns have been expressed (Michael Klenk, Are We Being Manipulated By Artificially Intelligent Software Agents? 3 Quarks Daily, 9 September 2019; Microsoft's Bill Gates insists AI is a threat, BBC News, 29 January 2015; Elon Musk: artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat, The Guardian, 30 October 2015).
Trivial applications of supercomputers? It is however curious to note the relatively trivial applications for which supercomputers are so enthusiastically developed. Few are of immediate significance to human well-being; many will result in unemployment -- although dubious claims to the contrary are made (Earl C. Joseph, et al, Real-World Examples of Supercomputers Used For Economic and Societal Benefits: a prelude to what the exascale era can provide, International Data Corporation, 2014). High levels of techno-optimism are evident in events such as Modeling the World's Systems (MWS 2019) with their focus on the science, technology and applications of modeling and managing complicated, interacting systems, at all scales (from molecular to global processes) and in multiple domains. Unfortunately these tend to avoid the challenge of "wicked problems" and the remedial capacity to address them.
Priority has clearly been given to adaptation of supercomputers to the challenges of cyberwarfare. Much more controversial are the applications to surveillance -- soon to become universal. Adaptation to profiling for marketing purposes and the systematic manipulation of collective opinion are similarly controversial.
It could be said that the development of exascale supercomputers epitomizes the need to go faster and faster in order to sustain a process dependent on evermore busyness. This is consistent with the dependence on economic growth at all costs -- challenged most recently in a declaration to the UN General Assembly as being a "fairy tale" (David Brancaccio and Daniel Shin, Sustainable growth and whether it's realistic or a "fairy tale", Marketplace, 24 September 2019).
It is vigorously argued that supercomputers are vital to climate and weather modelling (Sabine Hossenfelder, Is Climate Change Inconvenient or Existential? Only Supercomputers Can Do the Math, The New York Times, 12 June 2019). Whilst this is indeed the case, the emerging climate crisis frames a counter-argument in that their capacity to engender models of decision-making to enable appropriate strategic responses is seemingly virtually zero. This is further highlighted by the highly divisive politics of societies upheld as the epitome of democracy -- dynamics described as "toxic". No effort is made to apply supercomputers to develop more fruitful social models of greater credibility.
The World Economic Forum frames the potential proactively:
Supercomputers have the potential to turn us into superhumans. Our potential and power increase in lockstep with the tools we have to serve us. The World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on the Future of Computing is aiming to shape the direction of that power. Our goal is to define a positive, inclusive, and human-centric future of supercomputing. (Georgia Frances King, Supercomputing could solve the world's problems, and create many more, 20 February 2019)
In metaphorical terms it could be said that supercomputing has proven to be of little significance to modelling the "weather" and "climate" of societies and smaller groups -- and indicating viable means for transcending binary limitations and other challenges of social "turbulence" and "overheating" (Climate of Change Misrepresented as Climate Change: insights from metaphorical confusion, 2008; Weather Metaphors as Whether Metaphors Transcending solar illusion via a Galilean-style cognitive revolution? 2005). Of relevance to this argument are the design constraints and ambitions of three contrasting exascale supercomputer projects seeking funding from the European Union -- with limited focus on psychosocial challenges:
- Living Earth Simulator Project: a proposed massive computer simulation system intended to simulate the interactions of all aspects of life, human economic activity, climate, and other physical processes on the planet Earth
- Human Brain Project: to build a collaborative ICT-based scientific research infrastructure to allow researchers across Europe to advance knowledge in the fields of neuroscience, computing, and brain-related medicine.[
It could also be vigorously argued that supercomputers are vital to astrophysics and astronautics -- to the extent that these are framed as relevant to the challenges of life on Earth, however questionably (Challenges More Difficult for Science than Going to Mars -- or exploring the origins of the Universe or of Life on Earth, 2004). In metaphorical terms again, missing is their relevance to "noonautics" (Towards an Astrophysics of the Knowledge Universe -- from astronautics to noonautics? 2006). Exceptions include:
- Muffy Calder, et al, Computational modelling for decision-making: where, why, what, who and how, Royal Society Open Science, 20 June 2018
- Nicola Perra and Luis E. C. Rocha Modelling opinion dynamics in the age of algorithmic personalisation Scientific Reports 9, 2019, 7261) |
- Corentin Vande Kerckhove et al., Modelling Influence and Opinion Evolution in Online Collective Behaviour Plos One, 23 June 2016
There has been notable cultivation of the metaphor of a "global brain", a neuroscience-inspired and futurological vision of the planetary information and communications technology network that interconnects all humans and their technological artifacts. Curiously, despite this, there is no attention to what might constitute the "corpus callosum" to reconcile the preoccupations of the disconnected "hemispheres" of global society (Corpus Callosum of the Global Brain? Locating the integrative function within the world wide web, 2014).
Abacus, suanpan and soroban: It is appropriate to this argument to note the importance of the abacus as a calculating tool that has been in use in the ancient Near East, Europe, China, and Russia -- and still remains in common use in some countries. Mention is now made of use in ancient Aztec culture of a form of abacus called a nepohualtzintzin. The suanpan is a form of abacus developed in China; the soroban is an abacus developed in Japan, derived from the Chinese suanpan. China and Japan continue to use their variants in education -- despite the availability of electronic calculators.
Of relevance to the argument developed here, an imaginary abacus can also be used, as mentioned by Wikipedia:
By learning how to calculate with abacus, one can improve one's mental calculation which becomes faster and more accurate in doing large number calculations. Abacus-based mental calculation (AMC) was derived from the abacus which means doing calculation, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, in mind with an imagined abacus. It is a high-level cognitive skill that run through calculations with an effective algorithm. People doing long-term AMC training show higher numerical memory capacity and have more effectively connected neural pathways. They are able to retrieve memory to deal with complex processes to calculate. The processing of AMC involves both the visuospatial and visuomotor processing which generate the visual abacus and perform the movement of the imaginary bead. Since the only thing needed to be remembered is the finial position of beads, it takes less memory and less computation time.
Glass Bead Game: Of potentially greater inspiration is the fictional study by the Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game, 1943) -- which continues to evoke emulations and commentary. As described by Rainer E. Zimmermann (The Modeling of Nature as a Glass Bead Game), Hesse introduces an essentially cosmic game within a symbolical Universe which recently has been compared with a "neuronal network of the cosmic mind". In his game all those games which are known to us today appear to be summarized. Hence, by closer inspection, according to Zimmermann, the glass bead game shows up as a meta-game, a proto-game, and as a playful paradigm of playing, at the same time. As its rules it encompasses all what characterizes the reflexive activity of humans within the worldly environ-ment. It thus aims towards all those fields of the sciences and arts which are a-vailable as the inventory of human orientation.
Hesse describes the rules as:
These rules, the sign language and grammar of the game, represent a kind of highly developed secret language, in which several sciences and arts, in particular mathematics and music (or the science of music) participate which are able to express the contents and results of practically all of the sciences and relate them to each other.
This systematic form of approach to a universal game, conceptualized in a global manner, implies an important methodological consequence. Hesse continues therefore:
The glass bead game is thus a game with all the contents and the va-lues of our culture, it plays with them, as in the heyday of the arts a painter may have played with the colours on his palette. What humankind has produced in its creative epochs in terms of knowledge, noble thoughts, and works of art, what the successive epochs of learnt reflexion have conceptualized and claimed as intellectual property, all of this extraordinary material of intellectual values is being played by the glass bead player like an organ is played by the organist, and this organ is of a hardly graspable perfection, its manuals and pedals are scanning the whole spiritual cosmos, its registers are almost uncountable, theoretically, the complete intellectual contents of the world could be reproduced by playing.
The degree of association with philosophy recalls the early enthusiasm for Rithmomachy -- a board game previously rivalling chess -- otherwise known as the Philosophers' Game.
Enhancing creative capacity and imagination: Whereas the abacus can indeed be understood as enhancing cognitive capacity, the question is what applications of computers -- and of supercomputers -- can be recognized as doing so. It could perhaps be argued that it is the application of ever greater computer power to social media dynamics and online gaming which is of greater relevance to the exploration and enhancement of psychosocial processes.
The specific focus of the Triple Helix model of innovation seeks to foster economic and social development through enhancing the interactions between academia, industry and governments. It could be asked to what degree such innovation is enabled to a higher degree through the use of supercomputers. It can be argued that virtual reality, enabled by supercomputers, is of specific relevance to enhancement of creativity, although there is little attention to this possibility (Psychosocial Learnings from the Spiral Form of Hurricanes, 2017; Framing Cyclic Revolutionary Emergence of Opposing Symbols of Identity, 2017).
Despite the remarkable possibilities of supercomputers, it is clear that they will enngender a new array of problems with which human creativity will be faced (Peter Dockrill, Computers Are Making Huge Mistakes Because They Can't Understand Chaos, Scientists Warn, Science Alert, 27 September 2019).
Stuart Russell How to Stop Superhuman A.I. Before It Stops Us, The New York Times, 8 October 2019) The answer is to design artificial intelligence that's beneficial, not just smart. ***
Metacomputing and hypercomputing? As implied by the term, metacomputing encompasses forms of research on the development and applications of computing, including socio-cognitive engineering (despite its questionable nature). From a systemic and philosophical perspective, it frames a focus on the limits of the transformation of human knowledge and individual thinking to the form of computer programs.
Of far greater relevance to this argument is what has been associated with hypercomputing, notably in the light of the speculations of Alan Turing (as noted above). This has been discussed separately (Imagining Order as Hypercomputing: operating an information engine through meta-analogy, 2014) under the following headings:
The question of interest is the manner in which higher orders of "computation" can facilitate, enhance and sustain the kinds of imagination of relevance to the extreme challenges with which society is purportedly faced. Arguably the focus of exascale computation to date is on relatively simple (if not trivial) problems which demand myriads of simple calculations -- "quantitative" problems rather than the "qualitative" problems more intimately related to individual and collective learning. Supercomputers are ranked according to such quantitative measures. The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world.
There is little indication that supercomputers are especially skilled in detection of pattern correspondences of significance to imaginative innovation and creativity. Or is success in game-playing to be understood as a valid counter-indication, despite lack of other evidence?
Superquestions -- beyond the trivial? Provocatively it can therefore be asked how "superquestions" might be identified and configured in a time of crisis -- questions meriting a higher order of investment, as argued separately (Coping Capacity of Governance as Dangerously Questionable: recognizing assumptions and unasked questions when facing crisis, 2019; Superquestions for Supercomputers: avoiding terra flops from misguided dependence on teraflops? 2010; ). The latter included the following sections:
Whilst search engines are increasingly remarkable in responding to specific queries, curiously there is no requirement for them to be able to detect the unasked questions and assumptions implied by such queries -- the "unsaid" (Global Strategic Implications of the "Unsaid", 2003; Question Avoidance, Evasion, Aversion and Phobia, 2006).
Is it hypercomputation, using supercomputers or otherwise, which could enable "deadly questions" to be identified and highlighted (as noted above)? Is it precisely such questions which engender and enable fruitful change and innovation -- rather than reinforcing conventional patterns of thinking? Noteworthy in this regard is the subsequent sidelining of population growth as a problem driver featured in the early use of computers for global modelling -- resulting in the report on The Limits to Growth (1972). Is it expected that artificial intelligence can formulate questions in the light of contradictions and dilemmas? Potentially understood as wicked problems, a notable example is the complex of resource constraints, corruption, population growth, arms race, inequality, and criminalization of remedial options (migration, contraception, abortion, or suicide). Is there a need for hypercomputation to formulate adequately "wicked" strategies (Encycling Problematic Wickedness for Potential Humanity, 2014; Engaging with Hyperreality through Demonique and Angelique? Mnemonic clues to global governance from mathematical theology and hyperbolic tessellation, 2016)?
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