Behold our new gods
Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:13 am
In 1979 on a trip around Mexico I climbed the Pyramid of the Sun, just outside Mexico City. To appreciate the size and scale of the place, make sure you reference the people in the foreground:
Altitude is over 7,000 feet, just outside smoggy Mexico city. The steps may look gentle, but it's a 32 degree slope. I was overweight, out-of-shape and a pack-a-day smoker at the time, carrying a heavy bag of camera equipment.
If you've ever experienced oxygen deprivation at high altitude, there's a place where your vision behaves like it does just before you pass out. Colors get brighter, and your retinal sharpness filter seems to have a special enhancement. When I got to the top of the Pyramid, I sloughed off the camera bag, put my hand on my knees while my lungs screamed for oxygen, and looked out at the color-enhanced landscape. In the valley below was a Catholic church, tall enough to have a bell tower. There it was: the largest religion in the world. And it was was tiny, dwarfed by the Pyramid upon which I was gasping for air. And on the top of that Pyramid I had a meditative experience that has become a little reference touchstone in my life.
The Catholic Church is the largest religion in the world, but the monuments to that God were dwarfed by the edifice built by the Aztec theocracy. As my my body climbed out of oxygen debt, I thought about the power and purpose of theocratic rule, when all of society's labor could be focused on a particular goal. And it led me to thinking about the monuments in our own culture. In a culture not dominated by religion, where were our monuments?
Sports stadiums were the first thing that came to mind. To be fair, the Mayans had sports stadiums with human sacrifices. (DO NOT let Trump get wind of this!). Sports stadiums and skyscrapers are our largest edifices, and proxy warfare occurs in both.
But the analogy was too simple, too pat. What else? And I realized that our largest monuments are difficult to see, because they are too large and too hidden. And those are the monuments to communication. Superhighways, airports and underground cable.
We don't think of highways as monuments or edifices, but consider that you step on a piece of asphalt in New York City, and it doesn't end until the other side of the continent. There has been a cable on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and America since the 1850's, and a ribbon of steel across North America since the 1880's. And I realized that our largest monuments are not for communicating with Gods but for seeing the world and communicating with each other.
On the top of that Pyramid I had a little moment in the nexus between pre-Columbian, Columbian, and Industrial age civilization. In the intervening 39 years we've had the computer revolution and we're making the transition from the industrial to the information age.
In the early axial age, gods of different religions fought it out. Today the gods are far more civilized, and leave the fighting to their disciples. The gods that duke it out on earth today are the supercomputers.
Summit, a computer made by IBM and Nvidia just claimed the title as the world's fastest supercomputer. If you don't think it's a monument, consider the following:
Perhaps it will be used for scientific experiments as well, but this sound like a device for sifting through mountains of human data (like email and text messages) looking for patterns. Perhaps this is the beginning of the A.I. threat foreseen by Stephen Hawking.
Anyway, the world is getting braver and newer every day. Thank Ford!
Altitude is over 7,000 feet, just outside smoggy Mexico city. The steps may look gentle, but it's a 32 degree slope. I was overweight, out-of-shape and a pack-a-day smoker at the time, carrying a heavy bag of camera equipment.
If you've ever experienced oxygen deprivation at high altitude, there's a place where your vision behaves like it does just before you pass out. Colors get brighter, and your retinal sharpness filter seems to have a special enhancement. When I got to the top of the Pyramid, I sloughed off the camera bag, put my hand on my knees while my lungs screamed for oxygen, and looked out at the color-enhanced landscape. In the valley below was a Catholic church, tall enough to have a bell tower. There it was: the largest religion in the world. And it was was tiny, dwarfed by the Pyramid upon which I was gasping for air. And on the top of that Pyramid I had a meditative experience that has become a little reference touchstone in my life.
The Catholic Church is the largest religion in the world, but the monuments to that God were dwarfed by the edifice built by the Aztec theocracy. As my my body climbed out of oxygen debt, I thought about the power and purpose of theocratic rule, when all of society's labor could be focused on a particular goal. And it led me to thinking about the monuments in our own culture. In a culture not dominated by religion, where were our monuments?
Sports stadiums were the first thing that came to mind. To be fair, the Mayans had sports stadiums with human sacrifices. (DO NOT let Trump get wind of this!). Sports stadiums and skyscrapers are our largest edifices, and proxy warfare occurs in both.
But the analogy was too simple, too pat. What else? And I realized that our largest monuments are difficult to see, because they are too large and too hidden. And those are the monuments to communication. Superhighways, airports and underground cable.
We don't think of highways as monuments or edifices, but consider that you step on a piece of asphalt in New York City, and it doesn't end until the other side of the continent. There has been a cable on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and America since the 1850's, and a ribbon of steel across North America since the 1880's. And I realized that our largest monuments are not for communicating with Gods but for seeing the world and communicating with each other.
On the top of that Pyramid I had a little moment in the nexus between pre-Columbian, Columbian, and Industrial age civilization. In the intervening 39 years we've had the computer revolution and we're making the transition from the industrial to the information age.
In the early axial age, gods of different religions fought it out. Today the gods are far more civilized, and leave the fighting to their disciples. The gods that duke it out on earth today are the supercomputers.
Summit, a computer made by IBM and Nvidia just claimed the title as the world's fastest supercomputer. If you don't think it's a monument, consider the following:
- It's about a million times faster than a laptop. That's not hyperbole. It's not, like, DUDE! like about a thousand times faster! It's not a hundred thousand times faster. It is approximately one million times faster than a laptop.
- There is a slight drawback to this performance, in the form of increased power consumption. It uses 13 megawatts of power, so you'll have to convince about 8,000 of your neighbors to conserve...well...everything. No human sacrifices (Sorry, Azteks!) but a lot of dead dinosaurs...expect limited battery life.
As MIT Technology Review explains, Summit is the first supercomputer specifically designed to handle AI-specific applications, such as machine learning and neural networks. Its thousands of AI-optimized chips, produced by Nvidia and IBM, allow the machine to crunch through hideous amounts of data in search of patterns imperceptible to humans. As noted in an Energy.gov release, “Summit will enable scientific discoveries that were previously impractical or impossible.”
Perhaps it will be used for scientific experiments as well, but this sound like a device for sifting through mountains of human data (like email and text messages) looking for patterns. Perhaps this is the beginning of the A.I. threat foreseen by Stephen Hawking.
Anyway, the world is getting braver and newer every day. Thank Ford!