Google Ups the Ante: Skip the Quantum. Aim Higher!
July 16, 2024
This essay is the work of a dinobaby. Unlike some folks, no smart software improved my native ineptness.
After losing its quantum supremacy crown to an outfit with lots of “u”s in its name and making clear it deploys a million software bots to do AI things, the Google PR machine continues to grind away.
The glowing “G” on god’s/God’s chest is the clue that reveals Google’s identity. Does that sound correct? Thanks, MSFT Copilot. Close enough to the Google for me.
What’s a bigger deal than quantum supremacy or the million AI bot assertion? Answer: Be like god or God as the case may be. I learned about this celestial achievement in “Google Researchers Say They Simulated the Emergence of Life.” The researchers have not actually created life. PR announcements can be sufficiently abstract to make a big Game of Life seem like more than an update of the 1970s John Horton Conway confection on a two-dimensional grid. Google’s goal is to get a mention in the Wikipedia article perhaps?
Google operates at a different scale in its PR world. Google does not fool around with black and white squares, blinkers, and spaceships. Google makes a simulation of life. Here’s how the write up explains the breakthrough:
In an experiment that simulated what would happen if you left a bunch of random data alone for millions of generations, Google researchers say they witnessed the emergence of self-replicating digital lifeforms.
Cue the pipe organ. Play Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The write up says:
Laurie and his team’s simulation is a digital primordial soup of sorts. No rules were imposed, and no impetus was given to the random data. To keep things as lean as possible, they used a funky programming language called Brainfuck, which to use the researchers’ words is known for its “obscure minimalism,” allowing for only two mathematical operations: adding one or subtracting one. The long and short of it is that they modified it to only allow the random data — stand-ins for molecules — to interact with each other, “left to execute code and overwrite themselves and neighbors based on their own instructions.” And despite these austere conditions, self-replicating programs were able to form.
Okay, tone down the volume on the organ, please.
The big discovery is, according to a statement in the write up attributed to a real life God-ler:
there are “inherent mechanisms” that allow life to form.
The God-ler did not claim the title of God-ler. Plus some point out that Google’s big announcement is not life. (No kidding?)
Several observations:
- Okay, sucking up power and computer resources to run a 1970s game suggests that some folks have a fairly unstructured work experience. May I suggest a bit of work on Google Maps and its usability?
- Google’s PR machine appears to value quantumly supreme reports of innovations, break throughs, and towering technical competence. Okay, but Google sells advertising, and the PR output doesn’t change that fact. Google sells ads. Period.
- The speed with which Google PR can react to any perceived achievement that is better or bigger than a Google achievement pushes the Emit PR button. Who punches this button?
Net net: I find these discoveries and innovations amusing. Yeah, Google is an ad outfit and probably should be headquartered on Madison Avenue or an even more prestigious location. Definitely away from Beelzebub and his ilk.
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2024
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