According to a story in the April 10, 2024, edition of The Wall Street Journal, Google is expanding its efforts to build an in-house chip development capability. According to the article, other internet-based companies are doing exactly the same thing - Amazon, for instance, and Microsoft. These companies have not been known as chip manufacturing companies. At least, they haven't been known for that until now. Clearly, things are changing.
The business impacts and implications of these new initiatives are interesting - and that's what the article in The Wall Street Journal is basically all about. However, if you'll stick with me (and this is a rather lengthy blog post), I want to suggest another implication of what's happening.
oooOOOooo
As anyone who reads my blog postings with any regularity is likely to know, I have a way of thinking about the world that suggests that there are at least TWO worlds that we inhabit, simultaneously. Most immediately, we inhabit a world that we have created ourselves. I call that the "Human World," or the "Political World." The "world" that we most immediately inhabit is basically the product of human action, based upon the ideas which human beings have had about what might be possible. First, we have an idea; then, we do things to make those ideas into realities. Someone "invented" the automobile (meaning that they thought it up), and now a lot of what happens in the world is based on the existence and use of automobiles. There was nothing "inevitable" about automobiles; human beings thought them up, and are still tinkering with what we have produced.
While we live, most immediately, in a world of our own creation, that world is not only a world of physical things, but is a world of relationships and "ideas" upon which all our human realities are founded. "Debt," for instance. That is a concept that has changed the human world profoundly.
But.... let's get back to the world that we do not create. This is a world upon which we ultimately depend for everything, a world into which we all find ourselves most mysteriously born. Picture Planet Earth in space. That is the world that I usually call the "Natural World," though I sometimes will venture to call it "The World That God Made."
The point is that there is a world upon which everything we do and create is premised - and this world is NOT a world that we have created ourselves. The "laws" that apply in the "World of Nature" are not like our human laws; they are laws that we can't break. They are the laws of physics! Gravity is an absolute (as are the other physical laws that apply in the "World of Nature"). E = MC (Squared) means that we have the capability of blowing up everything. Now that we know about this possibility, it is and will remain a possibility for ever, and we have to deal with it!
Back to the high-tech chip. If you read that story in The Wall Street Journal, you will find that the internet-based companies that are now trying to manufacture their own, high-tech chips are doing that in order to save money, as they work to deploy "Artificial Intelligence," or "AI." It turns out that the chips that power AI use massive amounts of energy (and using ever more energy is the exact opposite of what we need to do, since global warming is a "real," physical fact).
To integrate that last statement into the "Two Worlds" hypothesis that I have been reviewing, global warming is a phenomenon of the "Natural World." The Laws of Nature say that if we continue to burn hydrocarbon fuels, and if we release increasing amounts of methane into the atmosphere, the world will heat up, and this means, inevitably, that we will then experience impacts on the "Natural World" that we will have to live with. Rivers and water bodies will dry up, crops will fail, and people will die. Wildfires will burn through our forests, releasing even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Hurricanes will rage. Cyclones will appear in Scotts Valley! As long as we continue actions that continue to heat up the planet, we will be forced to try to reconfigure our own "Human World" to take account of what our activities have done to the "Natural World." This is true because (while we may not like to admit it) our human lives and human civilization do depend, totally, on the Natural World - the "World That God Made." If you want to start having some "religious" insights right about now, that would certainly be both understandable and appropriate.
Whether we like it or not, we do live in a "Natural World" upon which we totally depend, and that World of Nature preexists our own human existence, and the existence of a "Human World" that is the basis of the human civilization that we take to be "reality."
The "World of Nature" is premised upon laws and realities that we may have learned about, and learned to manipulate, but that we did not create ourselves. Configuring our "Human World" to make it possible for human beings to continue to live, requires that we find techniques to make our human actions consistent with the requirements of the "World of Nature."
I have opined, more than once, as I recall, on the need to do "Less," as one major strategy to try to bring our "Human World" into a proper relationship with the "World of Nature" upon which our "Human World" is totally dependent. "Politics," as frequent readers will remember, is what I advise as the tool we can best use to make decisions that will have that result.
Stick with me here!
The new AI chips are, actually, aimed at implementing a different strategy. I doubt very many people have realized, as yet, the philosophical implications of what "Virtual Reality" and "Artificial Intelligence" propose. Instead of having us live in a "World of Nature" that is immediately present to us, even as we actually live in a "Human World" that we most immediately inhabit, human beings now seem to be trying to move the entirety of our "Human World" into a "digital" reality, so that our interactions don't take place in the physical reality that we now know as the "Natural World." Faster and cheaper computer chips are required to bring this new "Virtual Reality" into existence. An effort to create such a new "Virtual" world is what we are now trying to effectuate, and we are using "Artifical Intelligence" to achieve it.
Let us assume that human beings are successful - to a significant degree - in transferring most of our life, and the economic, political, and social reality we inhabit, into this "Virtual World." This new world ("cowardly," not "brave," the way I see it) will be supported by high-tech chips. We will "go to school" on Zoom. Our jobs will be online, and we will have sex online. We will "learn," and "visit the planet" by utilizing the world that high-tech chips will bring to us, accessed through the goggles that we wrap around our faces or the screens we place before them. We will no longer need to "know" anything ourselves, because "Artificial Intelligence" will already "know" everything worth knowing.
Do I sound "hysterical," yet?
Well, if those reading this blog posting will admit that there is at least "some truth" in what I am saying here about where our civilization seems to be going, then think about what will happen when the power goes down.
And it will go down, for sure. The "Virtual World," a human creation, requires a never-failing source of electric power. There will be some act of sabotage, or a solar flare, or something like that, and suddenly ALL communications will be cut, almost everywhere. Was the loss of the Baltimore Bridge a big problem? Well, that will be seen to have been a minor problem, compared to the disruptions that will come as we build a "Virtual World," a world that is separate from the World of Nature, and upon which we are trying to establish the foundation of our human lives.
Well, there you have it.
You have just read my initial thoughts, stimulated by thinking about the "implications" of the decision of Google (our "information provider" about the world we inhabit) to start building high-tech chips (in order to make more possible a "Human World" that is increasingly located not within the "Natural World," but in a "Virtual Reality" created by human beings).
I don't "hope I am wrong," which would be one normal reaction to this vision of what we're doing.
I am hoping that we will come to our senses (a phrase that seems appropriate, since it does associate reality to our physical senses, an aspect of our lives that is clearly still tethered to the "World That God Made"). I am hoping that we will stop our continuing efforts to insulate ourselves from the "World of Nature," upon which all we have ever created, and all of our lives ultimately depend.
We are "in this together," and it's "up to us."
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