{"id":1695,"date":"2009-10-13T13:43:17","date_gmt":"2009-10-13T21:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/13\/if-everything-is-a-computation\/"},"modified":"2009-10-13T13:48:31","modified_gmt":"2009-10-13T21:48:31","slug":"if-everything-is-a-computation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/13\/if-everything-is-a-computation\/","title":{"rendered":"If Everything is A Computation…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today it\u2019s raining hard for the first time in about seven months. What we call a \u201cstorm\u201d\u009d here in the Bay Area.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So naturally this morning I was on the freeways, driving up to the Executive Briefing Center at HP between Sunnyvale and Palo Alto. I was there to give a talk for the Institute of the Future, who were hosting a meeting on the theme, \u201cWhen Everything is Programmable.\u201d\u009d I\u2019ve written about this line of thought in my book The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul<\/em><\/a>\u2014and of course it\u2019s something I\u2019ve discussed in my SF as well.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I had a PowerPoint presentation ready for my talk, with the title, \u201cEverything is a Computation.\u201d\u009d You can see the slides as a PDF file online<\/a>. I\u2019ve learned always to post my slides in advance like this, as so often it\u2019s hard to get your laptop working amid the chaos of the rostrum.<\/p>\n

My message was that, yes, it\u2019s useful to think of the world as being made up of a lot of interacting computations: physics, biology, psychology, and society. And, yes, if we see the unfolding stream of events as made of computations we can sometimes get a better grasp on how to tweak what\u2019s coming down. But\u2014and this is, I would say, the key fact\u2014naturally occurring computations are unpredictable.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Natural events are orderly enough not to be random, but they\u2019re unpredictable in the sense that there aren\u2019t any shortcut methods that reliably predict what will happen over any longer period of time. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s why weather forecasts are only good for a few days out. That\u2019s why technical analysts don\u2019t always win in the stock market. That\u2019s why the legislatures can\u2019t ever really fix things the way they\u2019d like. And that\u2019s why no product design is effective for more than a couple of years.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This isn’t just my crackpot opinion, by the way, it’s a formal argument from computer science. In a nutshell: natural processes are complex enough to be universal computations, and, due to the unsolvability of the halting problem, we know there’s no simple algorithm to predict the behavior of a universal computation on an arbitrary input.<\/p>\n

What to do? Stay alert, remember that you\u2019ll be wrong pretty soon, and be ready to change. Trust your instincts…you’ll always be smarter than your machines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today it\u2019s raining hard for the first time in about seven months. What we call a \u201cstorm\u201d\u009d here in the Bay Area. So naturally this morning I was on the freeways, driving up to the Executive Briefing Center at HP between Sunnyvale and Palo Alto. I was there to give a talk for the Institute […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1695"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1696,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1695\/revisions\/1696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}