Cyberpunk 2077 — software will run the world, even if the game is rigged
The video game Cyberpunk 2077 is breaking the world. People were awaiting its release for many years but the crashing and unworkable software made many people cry to sleep. Some even took a week off from work just to experience it.
It is obvious our world has yet to see the technological boom in the cyberpunk cities. It is going to take few more decades it is inevitable. Technology is the artform from a human being that reflects on possibilities what reality can be.
Art is the escape from the physical bounds of nature. It warps the time and space and can exist outside of its context. Humans are the only creatures who have the ability for abstract thinking (so far known). The ability to derive the meaning and “perfect” patterns from something that is inconsistent and various as the material world. We created language, music, mathematics, and God.
Software is the form of art — an expression of someone else’s software in their minds printed on different mediums like sounds, materials, writing, and in 21st century a software on a computer.
Software has a better potential to describe reality than hardware
If software is a form of art — created entity, then the software is just a manifestation of our abstract thinking to create even more abstract concepts that has a reliable affect back on the physical reality. Architects and industrial designers no longer think of a great design to be just beautiful. It has to beget the experience on the user where the user will no longer see itself separate from designed physical. A great building will make a person feel belonging, and a great phone will an extension of the person.
Nature begets the human and human begets the technology that challenges nature to be possibly different than it portrays it to be. The senses she invented for us only has the ability to see more or less 1% of an actual reality. Think of different ways animals and insects perceive their surrounding.
The green plants are actually not green. The colors become just an after effect from something (sun) shinning on something (we call “plant”) that results in a experience we call plant. That something we call “flower” may be just the projection and not really real because of our biological cognitive architecture. Even the touch and shape of the flower is an average experience of what is actually happening. However, with technology, human hope to exponentially discover what’s real or to prove otherwise that maybe everything is just a projection.
It will be interesting to see if VR can cast a shadow of doubts. Maybe it can show that the material world is not that “hardware” as we think. If the VR will be so good where the user forgets he or she is in the digital world, then how can we defend that the “actual world” is not just a very very good projection? The experience of real “be real” will no longer be so convincing.
Practical and Quantum Limitations of Software
I wouldn’t be surprised if a child living in poverty would gladly exchange the physical living for a chance to live in a digital world. We can store the body in the capsule on Mars and have the consciousness uploaded on hard drives.
But the Cyberpunk 2077’s failure is an example where the software is useless if you have a shitty computer or the software itself is not build correctly. Like the battery dies on the phone, and the phone becomes useless.
Also, the further we separate ourselves from the nature, the less likely she can save us through diversity and evolution mechanics. We put ourselves in an arrogant position to think we can protect ourselves from an asteroid hitting Mars or Earth one day, storing our frozen bodies and hard drives consciousness.
Of course there is also quantum limitations to run data heavy simulated realities. Quantum computers reinvent the transistors technology to increase the flow of current by charging electron with frequency to the excited state, and therefore flipping their magnetic spin, so that when released, the energy will burst along the resting electrons in the transistor.
Because electrons have an entanglement states it allows more room for data to be stored per bit or qubit in the quantum computer. For example, it takes only 70 qubits to process all the digital data (~ 1 zettabyte) that exist today in the world while performing computation with it.
The human nature will always seek expand its power and, right now it has all hands on deck to use computational power generating and handling software that will have an immense impact on the nature of reality.
Software of the human is — human nature itself, and it will seek to create such computational software that will alter the the humans themselves, away from its disability to control its environment and be what it wants it to be.
