It's Beer O'Clock: The End of Silicon

The end of silicon, the horizon beyond binary, and why people may be suffering from a mass delusion designed to persuade you that dizzying plurality is a singularity.

This next bid at AI hype prize made a splash recently: lab grown brains running first living computer in Switzerland.

While we aren't ready to go crazy for this next St. Elmo's Fire on the horizon line of our earth ship lost at sea, it does remind us here to remind you all that technology innovation has infinite variety. The idea of "totalizing platforms" or as some strange people like to say "platform of platforms" like they are looking for the One Ring to Rule Them All, is a trick for people who want to close down innovation and the stream of ideas to solutions that seem to evolve to the point of them and their own importance in history. This is useful for investors for its theatrical effects on an unsuspecting public, we get it. It's also useful for those who want to hoard and coalesce influence in the political sphere. We get that, too. However, at Singular XQ we are looking for places where the ideas open up into a plurality and not a singularity. That's the joke in our name.

Is change actually slowing down?

Despite the frenetic "pace of change" messaging we receive, there are many who argue that change is slowing down . Still others argue that we achieved stasis in the Industrial Revolution and the manufacturing of the illusion that change is still speeding up is a pretext for those who'd like to keep innovation in stasis so that the locuses of control and wealth will continue to persist where they are. This makes sense to people cognizant of the way in which Industrial Revolution mindset hinder business success and more to the point halted human progress and has left indelible scars. As interesting as theses arguments are, this is "It's Beer O'Clock" which is intended to be casual thoughts about the innovation research happening within our six initiatives at Singular XQ Research Futures practice. One of our initiatives is focused on Sustainability, which like most of our work, has a broad, decentralized but loosely networked series of issues threading through it. One that is mine particularly is my interest in the idea that we are moving "Beyond Binary." We have reached the ceiling of binary and what it can do. As Singular XQ (on pre-order now! click. I hate sales. But click.) argues, the coming singularity may in fact be correct. We are converging on something, but we may be almost comically mistaken about what it is. (Buy, click, if you want to find out. Man ALIVE do I hate sales.)

What is next, then?

To that end, we believe that the business world is currently manufacturing false images of totalizing solutions and options in an ever increasing diversity and pluralistic stream of ideas and thoughts that feels to them like drinking from a firehose. Imagine a picture of a star and we focus on it. As you move into it the image of the star is a false front. It's galaxies of stars. Almost infinite in possibility and variety. It's easier to sell the star to a lot of people isn't it? We require concerted effort in our current media channels, inequitably dominated by those who gain the most influence and capital in making us believe that there is only one dominant and successful solution to the VUCA state of the world. So consider this our wakeup call: the likelihood of LLM or some improved version of it or any of the other literally thousands of interesting things emerging from this eruption being a single totalizing solution for anything. We include in this group neurosymbolic processing , STLMS , alternatives to Markov models, Quantization and so on. Many of our partners and network friends in the start-up and open-source spaces are working in these veins and we applaud them and don't think it a waste, on the contrary, this is what continuous learning looks like, but remember that it is predicated on the idea that binary and silicon don't themselves have ends or at least, diminished roles in our future horizons and that these have profit margin potential for an extended runway that may or may not exists. For fools like us, this is an exciting idea, not a disappointing one. However, if this reality hasn't hit you yet, you might be suffering from a notable mass hysteric confirmation bias in human history.

What we are (almost) certain of...

Our research assures you that it is almost a certainty that the end of the runway is already here and that what we are seeing right now has many names for it, depending on the discipline or field it emerges from. The endowment effect, the sunk cost fallacy , or even the idea in art that something becomes reified and falsely inflated the moment it has died, satirizing the very means of its production . Thinking of the caricatured technology leaders with their increasingly bizarre haircuts and fashion styles and the inflation of silicon chips as economic messiahs, it seems certain that a fair number of people know the limits of binary and silicon have been reached and that something new on he horizon threatens to destabilize is inevitable. What else might their be--well moving beyond binary and beyond silicon are separate but related ideas but look at some different and more efficient possibilities on the horizon

1. Graphene
2. Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs)
3. Gallium Nitride (GaN)
4. Silicon Carbide (SiC)
5. Quantum Dots
6. Neuromorphic Computing
7. DNA Computing
8. Optical Computing
9. Topological Insulators
10. Phase-Change Materials

These have challenges and limitations, obstacles to scaling, but looking at what's happened in LLMs why should that stop anyone?

What about bio-organic computing?

The most important thing to understand is without any human interaction plants compute. This is the most fascinating concept because it challenges so many biases and assumptions that undergird our obsession with computing machines. What we count as one of our highest levels of intelligence actually occurs in almost all the lowest forms.

This is why we like this area of research the best. If we are as some thinkers have it, environorganisms, and we exist on a continuum with our living environments the opposition of machines to organic material is certain to create volatility and chaos and degenerate rather than generate. What does it look like if we partner with the natural world and create synergy? It may just create another exploitative practice in which the whole natural world is subsumed up in a made dash to innovate if it is not handled carefully and with guardrails. With the right frameworks we see reciprocal loops of understanding in these areas of research if they are undertaken as discovery rather than profit seeking. We have yet to see a social economic model for innovation that manages to do this though some have been proposed.

Where can we read the research reports SXQ Research Futures is producing?

We are fundraising privately and through granting organizations to scale our full time team which is almost entirely volunteer right now. In the meantime we are looking into the myriad ways in which bio-organic materials (some of which are mentioned in the prior list as well) are making an impact in the horizons beyond the stock market. Smart business people keep an eye on both things. We believe that this has a lot of potential to fuse with the interest in smart communities cropping up globally which have green ambitions along with efficient Industry 4.0 models of living. Follow us here--I will continue to breadcrumb drop as our Research Futures practice evolves. We need researchers of all disciplines (don't be bound by "I know nothing about that"). And we need money. Not a lot. Some. We were too hasty in rolling open-access research and open-source development too soon and we are working slowly to build the right infrastructure to support it.

Until then we are looking these six areas generally.

1. Biomolecular Computing
2. DNA-Based Logic Gates
3. Synthetic Biology
4. Protein-Based Computing
5. Organic Electronics
6. Hybrid Systems

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