Subconscious is Squishy Computer

This newsletter is getting a new name: Squishy Computer.

Subconscious is winding down, but I’m venturing forward to build something new (more about this in a future email). The newsletter is getting rebooted as my personal lab notebook, a place for me to post trail markers as I continue to navigate the idea maze around AI, malleable computing, tools for thought, and decentralized protocols.

So, why Squishy Computer?

I’m interested in software that is organic, open-ended, and evolving, software that fosters living ecosystems… squishy computers.

Ecosystems can't possibly exist for a particular purpose. (Hayao Miyazaki)

The internet is like this, so is the web. My question is, how can we make more software like this?

I like to look at software ecosystems through the lenses of evolution and ecology. There is so much we can learn by stepping out of top-down factory methods of production, and seeing software like biology.

We have to actually lose the idea of intelligent design, because that's actually what that is. The top-down theory is the same as intelligent design. And we have to actually stop thinking like that and start understanding that complexity can arise in another way and variety and intelligence and so on. So my own response to this has been, as an artist, to start to think of my work, too, as a form of gardening.  So about 20 years ago I came up with this idea, this term, 'generative music' […]

And essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life. And that life isn't necessarily exactly what you'd envisaged for them. It's characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I'm really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound. So in fact, I'm deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience. I want to be surprised by it as well.  And indeed, I often am.

(Brian Eno, 2011. Composers as Gardeners.)

It is my belief that open-ended ecosystems are where innovation comes from. The innovation is the system surprising itself. When a system can’t surprise itself, it can’t innovate. Top-down planned systems are like that. We already know everything they will produce, since it was planned from the beginning. These kinds of systems don’t last for long.

If it is in equilibrium, it must be dead! (John H. Holland)

Only that which can change can continue. (James Carse)

I hope to understand and build more open-ended ecosystems through software. I’ll post here along the way, sharing project updates, ideas, design patterns, and snippets of books and papers.

Towards a squishy computer,
-Gordon