Our second contributor, Michael Azubike, is a computer science student at Syracuse University. Passionate about the intersection of technology and art, he explores ways to blend the two fields. As both a programmer and artist, he shares his creative work under the name Michael Corduroy. He writes in:
What
you’re looking at is a colorful yet simple rendition of Conway’s Game of Life. Technically a ‘zero’ player game, the program is named after British mathematician John Conway who devised it in 1970 with just
a pen and paper.
Hunched
over, scrawling ink squares in geometric patterns over sheets of paper, Conway quickly realized that with four simple rules he had created a unique system that so closely resembled biological processes like self-replication, mutations, and cell death. He aptly
dubbed his algorithm, “Game of Life”, unknowingly pioneering a new paradigm of life-like machines.
It
would be only 12 years later that the very first computer virus, Elk Cloner, would be written by a 15 year old high school student. “The program with a personality”, Elk Cloner would copy itself and spread via floppy disks between Apple II computers in a pre-internet
era. Its only instruction, “create more of yourself”, was the sole driving force for its existence; the same self-preservation that exists in living organisms.
Reproduce
or die. The fundamental edict behind all living things, that quietly pulls the strings over how we run our society was staring right back at us in lines of code.
It
was/is in everything; natural selection gradually evolved the both of us, granting us better tools and communication. In a similar way, our eternal need for faster loading, more search results, and smarter technology allowed the superior tech to thrive in
a market that handsomely rewards ubiquitous tech from our favorite companies with more money to make even better tech, while the “inferior” tech (our CDs, our fax machines, our flip-phones), slowly fade away.
Even
our very imagination, which for so long we lauded as what separated us as a cut above the rest of the creatures of Earth, was adopted and outdone by our own creative advancements. We created languages, they learned all of them and began talking back with us, even
writing their own better variations. We showed them our art, our music, and our literature; they studied it with impossible detail, and have begun creating juvenile imitations of our life’s work in minutes, steadily erasing and redrawing what will inevitably
become flawless.
Computers
that communicate within groups, microchips that resemble top-down images of our cityscapes… Anxiety creeps in through our ears and past our eyes before we ask ourselves, “Are They more like Us or are We more like Them?”.
Could
it be possible that we’re just meat computers who figured out how to program ourselves? Complete with DNA firmware, we might’ve just learned a very little bit about how we tick and invented things like money, morals, and status to organize ourselves into what
could be looked at as one big living organism, or one big humming computer.
Regardless
of whether that matters or not, we’ve developed something here that’s coming asymptotically closer to being us, and we might be doing it on purpose. We’ve built machines that can think, walk, and talk just like us, all by ourselves; nobody told us “build this”
(as far as we know). Now as our creations are “catching on” and doing the rest of the growing by themselves, we’ll eventually have to answer the question, “are we ready to look at whatever they grow into?”.
It’s
more likely than not that by the end of the 21st century, We won’t be the most advanced organisms on this planet in a less literal sense. There’s an analogy Neil deGrasse Tyson uses to explain how advanced a hypothetical alien species might be, “imagine explaining
arithmetic to a dog, something that comes so naturally to our toddlers, impossible for them to grasp”. We may as well be building the aliens right here on Earth.
This
isn’t to be pessimistic, the future, while uncertain, remains bright for us. We might uncover mysteries about how to eradicate certain viruses, expand into the vast unknown frontier that is our galaxy, or possibly understand the deeper truth about the nature
of our existence.
My hope, all of our hopes, is that this technology that seems to so closely resemble us becomes an amicable partner; a second player in our game of life.