Birds Over Babel

On the imminent transformation of intelligence.

The accelerating evolution of digital computing and Artificial Intelligence is approaching a fundamental transformation.

Visions of endless datacenters sucking terrawatts of power, fears of thousand-year dictatorships enforced by killer robots, and fantasies of escaping the body through “mind-uploading” miss the larger context. Rather than an unlimited acceleration away from the embodied, the development of digital computation (through “AI”) is actually coming full circle to converge upon the analog structure of living organisms and ecosystems, and ultimately the innate "siddhic"¹ capabilities of the unfettered body-mind.

Fundamentally, computation is the purposeful transformation of information. A sequence of bits (1 and 0) is called a "word". In digital computing the significance of these “words” is entirely mediated by the software context; they have no intrinsic meaning ².

In contrast, generative AI works with geometric representations in a latent space (that is, lower-dimensional distillations of higher-dimensional structures); for example, the "parameters" of a language model which distill a matrix of semantic relationships from a vast corpus of training data. There is an underlying structure to the computation which is increasingly generalized and context-independent.

Traditional digital computers can simulate these higher-dimensional structures at great expense — like modeling a wave by representing every molecule of water. Yet these kinds of trans-contextual representations could be implemented in complex physical substrates, through an analog computing paradigm called reservoir computing.

Extrapolating along this trajectory, we can imagine a “universal computer” that “computes” according to universal archetypes of form. Of course, a universal computer would require a universal mind to operate it…

The technological trajectory is running its course. Long before digital computers, we externalized our intelligence as words, concepts, and tools. Our embodied intelligence diminished as our “artificial” intelligence complexified. Finally, our externalized intelligence has complexified and become self-referential (as “AI”), leading us back towards the subtle embodied intelligence we had forgotten.

The intense expansion of digital infrastructure is bringing analog living computing closer, not further — the crunchy yet crucial detour of bridging the explicit and the implicit. Leviathan data centers are a transitional stage, a chrysalis, that leads to far more agile devices that become trivially simple to produce until the computer itself becomes the body, the ecosystem, the universe — not philosophically or spiritually, but operationally, practically.

The tower of Babel powers toward heaven, yet birds simply fly overhead.

Modern computing assumes a continuous exponential increase in power over time. The most well-known description of this is "Moore's Law", the approximate doubling of microchip complexity (i.e. transistor density) every 2 years for the past 60 years.

In the past year or two this process has come to an end with transistors a single atom thick, at the edge of quantum indeterminacy where 1 and 0 cannot be separated. Other avenues for scaling computational power, such as increasing clock speed, have also reached their limit.

Yet like a dammed river, in an economic system dependent on continuous "growth" the vast momentum of tech development (some $10,000,000,000,000 a year) will carve new pathways to the ocean. It will do so by revisiting the fundamental architecture of modern computers, and considering what other possibilities are now available, especially as the explosion of AI carries unprecedented demands for computing power.

One such development is memristors (substances that combine "memory" and "processing" capabilities). Another is reservoir computing³ using complex physical substrates. Another is the intensive research into quantum computing.

These are all properties of living protoplasm — including the elusive "wet & warm" quantum coherence, which is fundamental to living organization⁴. In the end, the search for the ideal substrate for "artificial" intelligence will lead to living organization itself, which in hindsight was simply waiting for the computational paradigm to catch up.

Embodied computation reflects embodied intelligence. The transition is not just a matter of building more elaborate machines, but of cultivating a quality of awareness. $10 trillion is spent on external tech; what is the state of “inner technology”?

The near future of computing will be analog — and it will be both unlike anything that existed before and also exactly what has been here all along.

1. “Siddhi” is a term from the yogic tradition referring to extraordinary capabilities that emerge from internal cultivation. Often described as supernatural or magical, they represent the latent potential of unbound consciousness.

2. In universal semiotic systems such as the I Ching, Ilm Al-Raml, or IFA, each “word” represents a universal archetype, applicable on all scales and contexts. For example, in the I Ching, ䷀ (111111) is The Creative, while ䷁ (000000) is The Receptive. Geomancy uses 4 bit words, the I Ching uses 6 bit words, and IFA uses 8 bit words. Each of these systems is used as a kind of cultural semiotic index — symmetrical, scale-free, and complete — and it’s not hard to imagine this process extended ad infinitum as a means of encoding universal language. In fact, the Fu Xi (digital) sequence of the I Ching was the direct inspiration for the first binary system published in Europe, and the distant ancestor of modern computers.

“Transcendence”, the digital sequence of the I Ching.

“Immanence”, the analog sequence of the I Ching.

3. Reservoir (or “in materia”) computing is a universal analog computing paradigm that inputs a signal into a complex medium and trains an output layer to extract relevant information. One familiar example is echolocation - a tone is emitted, and meaningful information is extracted from the reflected sound. Another is a bucket of water used to perform complex calculations back in 2003 - by measuring the waves on its surface in response to specific inputs, differential equations can be solved “by the water” that would require substantial digital computing power to simulate. Unlike traditional digital computing which is explicit and bounded, reservoir computing is implicit and boundless; any input can be used, and any output can be extracted.

Reservoir computing reveals that computation is a continuum; everything is a computer and everything can be computed; it’s just a matter of appropriateness.

4. For a slightly technical narrative overview, see here. For a more technical and extensive overview, see here.