Sunday, June 28, 2015

Colossus: The Forbin Project

Colossus is an ultra-powerful computer with enormous reach and such a computer will inevitably take over the world.  The original story was written in 1966 by D.F. Jones and the movie came out in 1970.  About fifty years later the Internet provides the backbone for Colossus and the prescience of Jones' vision becomes more apparent as the power of the Internet grows.  (WIKI:  Colossus: the Forbin Project)


The Internet has gained the intelligence in the same way as mycelium which is a network of tiny fibers created by fungus from which mushrooms rise as 'fruit.'  The largest one yet discovered was ten square kilometers, comprised entirely of interconnecting fibers.  Some say the massive number of connections creates a virtual entity beyond that of a switching mechanism and that applies to the Internet in the same way as mycelium.  This is something of the concept in "Avatar" in which everything communicated with everything else through some type of mycelium under everything.

Part of the idea of network intelligence comes from the drone armies hackers have been using for years to launch denial of service attacks.  Simple code is implanted in an enormous number of unsuspecting drone computers (i.e. yours) and it becomes a collective agent with a single purpose, sometimes sending an email to a single target and consequently crashing that server with the volume.

The next more sophisticated application of network intelligence is in SETI (i.e. Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) as this mechanism also uses, with consent, a large number of computers and the code implanted on them is more intelligent insofar as it searches through data looking for patterns but still all of the distributed 'minds' are doing the same thing, they only do it in different places (i.e. they search different parts of the sky but all search its assigned part in the same way).

Beyond that is the system in which the implanted code is intelligent enough to communicate with the other sites on which it is present and the compute power which could be brought to bear on any problem in this way is staggering.  There are references to 'cloud computing' sometimes but typically this refers to a central system which is shared by multiple others but the network intelligence is doing it the other way around as the thinking is spread to every computer possible rather than centralizing it.


The number of interconnections for the Internet is now starting another increase of a different kind via the iWatch and the real-time medical telemetry it will be providing.  The question hardly ever asked about these capabilities isn't regarding the first application but rather what is the second.  The medical information will at the outset go where it was designed to go, presumably some type of medical facility for interpretation, etc.  The second question is where else does it go.


In parallel with the idea of a virtual network mind is the NSA approach in Stockdale, UT, in which they are building such an enormous computer system that it over-taxes the area's ability to provide water and power.  The system must be powerful enough to monitor communications traffic from around the world all at once.  Presumably such a thing is impossible but it's the image they create.

Where Colossus grows out of this is through extension of the ultra-computing capacity of a complex such as that of the NSA when it has access to your physical record in data capture from various sources but the real-time medical means it also has access to your health, likely your mood, maybe it can even tell whether you're currently getting lucky with the one you were lucky to ever find in the first place.


It took fifty years for Jones' vision to even show one green tentacle of its ugly self but it won't take even five for people to be radiating their health information to the nearest WiFi hotspot.  Unknown how many people bought an iWatch but some subset of them will be doing it soon.

When the military isn't being sent off to kill the lizard people of the Island of Green and Purple Spots, the state gets a self-satisfactory pleasure out of legislating morality so the medical interconnectivity of the new state permits it to monitor what you're doing and most devices also transmit location information so they know where you're doing it and who is doing it with you.


Here's a hypothetical in case you don't believe the state would ever do that.  Pop quiz:  you're the judge and the pregnant woman before is back for the second time this term on a charge of drug abuse.  You can give a court order for a medical monitor which transmits her health information to her doctor and some state department such that fetal health can be monitored along with the presence of inappropriate drugs.  If she uses much more of any inappropriate drugs, the fetus will die.  What will you do.

Note to Captain Kirk:  No, you cannot shoot her and then save the kid with a Caesarean section.  Both live or it's a fail.


So far this isn't much of a nightmare vision but it gets better.  Even if the state has live knowledge of your current medical telemetry, it can't intervene.  At worst it can send you an illegal substance abuse virtual ticket.


The beauty part is with drone aircraft as the next full evolution of these types of aircraft shouldn't need any human pilot, even one based somewhere on the ground in Nevada.  Various types of autonomous devices are proposed but it doesn't seem there is any large-scale build-up of big drones which can operate independently.  That does seem inevitable and then it's not such a leap to envision Colossus as the control system.

The military is said to have an independent Internet but Colossus cracks whatever codes or cables separate that from the open Internet.  Then the Forbin Project can come to life.  That's not such a great prospect for humans ... unless you don't mind subservience to a machine.

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