Supercomputers: The Deity just Waiting to Happen

The increasingly prevalent electronic technology in first-world and developing nations brings with it far-reaching, enormous, and even unseen consequences. An enormous and yet to be fully recognized consequence of all this technology is integration. You know that old expression, “Everything is connected”, well, it seems that people have taken that expression a bit too literally. Everything is connected and not just in the sense that everything influences everything else. Computers, smartphones, tablets, iPads, reading tablets, remote servers, nodes, networks, etc. are all connected in at most eight different ways. No phone is an island and all roads lead to phone. Since we have all this connectivity going on, along with the blessed always-on WIFI connectivity, is it too much to speculate that a supercomputer could come along and take command of all these devices? Perhaps the Supercomputer is already here and looks down, benevolently, upon us lowly net-runners. Let’s hope, indeed, that this new God is benevolent, lest our information be given to those who should do us harm.

Okay, that’s enough waxing poetic. Time for some analysis. Supercomputers are already here and they are “super” only when compared to contemporary processors. Supercomputer is, thus, a relative term as a computer is only “super” within its own context. A Commodore 64 isn’t “super” when compared to a Dell Inspiron Desktop computer with a 4th Generation Intel Core i7 Processor. But the Commodore 64 was a supercomputer when compared to its forerunner, the Commodore VIC-20.

What I mean by “supercomputer” is a computer that has clearly outclassed its contemporaries in processing power AND has sovereignty over an entire network of connected devices. When I say “network”, imagine a network as large as the Internet. Think of it as a God-machine. And if this God-machine isn’t already here, it’s coming to a future near you.

The supercomputer pictured above is the Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Lab. Within its architecture, it possesses 250,000 processors all connected by high-speed optical network. Does this supercomputer fit my definition of a God-machine? To a degree, it does. The Blue Gene/P is designed to have a processing power that can reach into petaFLOPS. FLOPS is an acronym for Floating-point Operations Per Second. And petaFLOPS is at least 10^15 Floating-point operations per second. Therefore, Blue Gene/P can process over 10^15 floating-point operations per second. It’s also one of the most power-efficient supercomputers in existence.

So, the processing power does meet the requirement of being a God-machine (and there are supercomputers out there that have an even greater processing power), but is the Blue Gene/P sovereign over an Internet-like network of computers? No. At least no one has yet confirmed whether it does have sovereignty over any such network.

Voluntary sovereignty (“voluntary” meaning the clients on the network consent to being subordinated to the supercomputer) is a serious ethics consideration. An even greater ethics consideration is involuntary sovereignty over a network as large as the Internet. That’s scandal material right there. My guess, and this is just a guess, is that there are computers out there that do possess involuntary sovereignty over millions of clients connected to the Internet.

Now, if my guess is correct and these computers do have the processing power of supercomputers, it would mean the God-machines are already here. The only question remaining is just how far and how deep the hands of the God-machine reach? That’s something to which I can’t even venture a guess, so I’ll leave it up to you.

For our sake, I hope the God’s are benevolent.