SUPERCOMPUTERS PART 4: THE DARK SIDE

In his latest article in a series about supercomputing, Dazed & Confused technology editor Chris Hatherill looks at the more sinister side of supercomputers…

In the future, according to Hugo de Garis and other Terminator and Matrix scenario believers, machines could overtake humans as the dominant life form on earth. Called, variously, intelligent machines, artificial intelligences or ‘artilects’, these systems could wipe out the human race without even noticing, or meaning to – it may simply be evolution.

Others, including award-winning photographer Simon Norfolk, point out that such machines are already among us, in the form of today’s most powerful supercomputers. His series, documenting military supercomputers around the world, is entitled “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that” in reference to the HAL 9000 supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. As he writes in the introduction, “the problem is not that these computers might one day resemble humans; it is that they already resemble gods.”

Indeed, a forthcoming documentary about Hugo de garis’ ideas is entitled Building Gods, and he has stated: “Humans should not stand in the way of a higher form of evolution. These machines are godlike. It is human destiny to create them.”

So have we got there already? Norfolk believes that in a way, the answer is yes. “The powerfulness sequestered in these machines can result only in our powerlessness,” he writes. “They are omniscient and omnipresent. These are qualities that describe the Divine.”

Norfolk, who travelled to underground labs. sterile clean rooms and deconsecrated churches to capture the world’s most powerful – and scary – supercomputers in their often surreal environments, notes that such machines are already “powerful almost beyond any human understanding.” They can map the billions of molecules in our DNA, calculate the gravitational pull of every star in the galaxy and peer into the centre of a nuclear explosion. It is this latter work that is occupying the world’s fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, and others like it.

Instead of exploding warheads for real, the US and other countries can simulate what happens when nuclear material decays and bombs age – but it’s a fine line between maintaining existing stockpiles and developing new ones. What we do with supercomputers and other advanced machines is up to us – for now at least – and how we use them reveals a lot about us as a species. As Norfolk said in an interview with popular website BLDGBLOG, “I started off in Afghanistan photographing literal battlefields – but I’m trying to stretch that idea of what a battlefield is. Those supercomputers – big Blue Gene, in particular – those are battlegrounds. That computer is as much a battlefield as a place in Afghanistan is, full of bullet holes.”

Next week: In the penultimate articles in the series, we’ll look at this year’s Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers – due to be unveiled next week. See you then.