Liam Spradlin writes:

According to computism, the world, including humans, can be computed: the bits that everything is made of can be represented and manipulated as data. The Universe can be governed, essentially, by code.

A tall modern building with a cloudy sky, cars parked in front, a person walking, and trees and grass in foreground.
Datacenter AMS1 at the Science Park in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2021. Photo by Anthony Deutsch/Reuters

Tech leaders have made enormous claims about how computation can manipulate the world. Elon Musk says that AI will ‘rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge’ and Dario Amodei, CEO of the AI company Anthropic, writes that graphics processing units will soon turn us into a ‘country of geniuses in a datacenter’. Others suggest that the Universe may be a simulation meant to bring about superintelligence, or that a future AI will be, literally, a god. Implicit in all these beliefs is that, in a world that can be predicted through computation, the most powerful person is whoever runs the computer. The datafication of our daily experiences and the increasing presence of predictive models are best understood through the lens of computism. When everything is computable, everything is predictable, optimisable and manipulable.

This narrative is not an invention of Silicon Valley. [Continue reading…]