Histories of Human Innovation as Histories of Computation

Innovation	Viewed as a Computation
Speech	Moving from gestures to speech gives people a higher bandwidth channel for communicating their thoughts. Society becomes able to perform more complicated computations.
Hunting and fishing	Knowing where to look for game means mentally simulating animal behavior, that is, it means emulating a computation. Using bait means influencing an animal’s computation by applying the proper inputs.
Agriculture	Knowing that seeds compute plants involves insight into the process of wetware computation. Plowing is a form of soil randomization. Irrigation is a way to program the analog flow of water. Crop rotation is an algorithm to optimize yields.
Animal husbandry	Caring for animal requires insight into their computational homeostasis. Selecting optimal individuals for further breeding is genetic engineering on the hoof.
Wheel	Wheeled carts allow long-range glider-like transferal of embodied information, making society’s computation more complex.
Law	A legal code is a program for social interactions. Enforcing the code produces high-level determinism which makes the system easier to manipulate.
Surveying	Surveys allow a society to determine simple address codes for physical locations. Space becomes digital.
Calendar	Noting the solar system’s cycles marks coordinates in time. Time becomes digital.
Sailing	Sailors learn to simulate and tweak the analog computation of airflow effects. Course planning involves higher-level simulation.
Pottery	The clay and the brushed-on glazes are the input, the kiln is the computer, the pot is the output.
Brewing and fermentation	The vat is a biocomputer, sensitive to the input variables of malt, sugar, and yeast. Over time, the best yeast strains are sought out by tasting and comparing; this is hill-climbing in a gustatory fitness landscape.
Spinning and weaving	The yarn is computed from the fibers. Weaving digitizes a surface into warp/woof coordinates. The loom is the first programmable mechanical computer.
Mining, smelting, and metallurgy	Mining is a form of data retrieval. The blast furnace transforms ore inputs into slag and metal outputs. Metallurgy and chemistry concern the computational rules by which matter combines and transforms.
Writing	Writing translates speech into a format portable across space and time. A written text promotes long-distance information exchange and long-term memory storage.
The alphabet	Using a limited number of symbols digitizes writing. Use of the alphabet also simplifies the algorithm for writing. The democratization of writing allows people to write things they wouldn’t be allowed to say.
Printing press	The type letters act as primitive symbols that are assembled into a kind of program--- which prints a page. Printing multiple copies of a text enhances class four communication.
Books	The book amasses large amounts of text into portable form. The book is the precursor of the hard drive.
Universities	A university provides a node where adults can exchange very large amounts of information. Given that the students go out and affect the society as a whole, the university is in some sense a central processing unit for the social hive mind, drawing together and processing society’s thoughts.
Water wheel and windmill	These devices convert chaotic fluid motions into regular periodic form. The excess information is returned to the fluid as turbulence.
Gunpowder	Bullets are high-speed gliders. Shooting someone allows an individual to do a remote erase. Reckless, catastrophic killing enhances interest in long-term information storage.
Machine tools	By creating precise mechanical tools for making machines, we model the biological process of self-reproduction. The machines come alive and begin evolving towards greater complexity.
Clocks	A finer-scale calendar, a zoom into the time dimension. Clocks use class two systems of gears that do the same thing over and over. Clocks are a tabletop model of determinism.
Steam engine	The steam engine is an artificially alive device that eats coal and transforms it into motion. The chaos of fire is converted into the reliable class two oscillation of the pistons.
Locomotive	When placed upon wheels, the steam engine becomes an autonomous glider. The country-to-city diffusion rate is changed, which in turn alters the Zhabotinsky scrolls of population movement.
Internal combustion engine	An evolutionary advance above the steam engine, and an early example of compressing the size of computational hardware.
Factory assembly line	The factory represents a computing system that codifies the procedures of a given craft. The possibility of mass production allows us to view physical objects as information, as abstract procedures to be implemented as many times as we please. Three dimensional objects can now be reproduced and disseminated as readily as books. Mass-produced devices become plug-ins for the computations embodied in people’s homes.
Movies	A temporal sequence is modeled by a series of discrete frames. An early form of virtual reality.
Automobile	The personal vehicle allows individuals to control transportation. A formerly centralized technology is now in the hands of the people. Meetings and markets can be freely arranged, making the economy’s computation more class four.
Electrical generators and motors	Electricity collapses the length of society’s computation cycles. The system clock speeds up. Electrical lights disrupt the cycle of day and night; computation becomes continuous. There is now less of a border between the media and the human nervous system. People begin to view themselves as components plugged into the hive mind.
Telegraph	Writing is transmitted as a digital binary code. Society begins to grow its electrical network.
Telephone	Unlike the telegraph, the telephone is a peer-to-peer medium--- you can make a phone call from your home without having to deal with a telegrapher. People are free to exchange “unimportant” information, that is, to talk about their moods and emotions, thus in fact exchanging a much higher-level kind of information than before.
Plastics	By designing new materials, chemists begin to program brute matter. Deformable and moldable, plastics can take on arbitrarily computed shapes. Objects are now programmable.
Radio	While books could broadcast digitized thoughts, radio broadcasts analog emotion. The hive mind gains power, as listeners form realtime virtual crowds.
Airplane	When riding in a plane, one can look out the window and see a landscape as an undivided whole, gaining a notion of a nation as a unit. With familiarity, people stop looking out the airplane windows, and air travel becomes a hyperlink, a teleportation device. In the United States, the “flyover” states become invisible to the cultural powers, promoting a schism in the hive mind.
Television	Since moving objects are important, our eyes have evolved to stare at flickering things; therefore we find TV hypnotic. Watching TV is work, our minds labor to fill in the missing parts of the virtual reality. Society gains a stronger hive mind than ever before. But at the same time, the hive mind is debased by ever more centralized control.
Atomic power	The physicists complete the chemists’ work, and even atoms become programmable. We see the must fundamental units of matter as information to be manipulated.
Computers	Billed as the universal machine, the computer is brittle and hard to use. The digitization of essentially everything begins, in most cases degrading and corrupting the information.
Email	Email spreads the workplace into the home. The upside is that you don’t have to commute, the down side is that you can’t leave the office. Email is addictive, and people become ever more plugged in. Yet email provides an alternate to the centralized news network, and many smaller hive minds take form.
The Web	The hive mind expands its consciousness. And at the same time the subhives’ minds gain further definition. The web page does for publication what the automobile did for transport --- the gatekeepers lose importance. The Web becomes the ultimate global information resource, the universal data base. Social computation becomes nearly frictionless; people can interact at a distant every more effortlessly.
Biotechnology	Biologists begin to program life. Society tries to apply legal codes to life, with unpleasant and confusing results. Real biological life continues anyway, still managing to avoid control.
Cell phones	A tight, personal, peer-to-peer medium that approaches telepathy. As people coordinate activities in real time, short-lived spontaneous mini-hive minds emerge.

The Past and Future Histories of Human Innovation as Histories of Computation

by Rudy Rucker
Copyright © Rudy Rucker, 2011

[In honor of Marshall McLuhan, this essay is adapted from Rudy Rucker, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul (Basic Books, New York 2005), and published online on July 24, 2011]

Link : http://www.rudyrucker.com/lifebox/pastandfuture.html