(2021-10-25) Sloan The Slab And The Permacomputer

Robin Sloan: The slab and the permacomputer. Here are three glimpses of the future of computing that all seem to “rhyme”:

1. Cloud functions (cf Lambda)

I now have about a dozen cloud functions running — or, I should say, waiting to run

2. Colab notebooks

For me, the magic is in the specific combination of Jupyter’s affordances with Google’s largesse: you open a browser tab, and poof, it’s a document with a powerful computer attached.

3. World computers

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), a kind of computer — simultaneously sophisticated and primitive — is likewise one logical entity, even if it’s distributed in space and time. As with a lot of things in crypto, the feeling is as much mystical as it is technical. I understand why people get excited when they deploy an Ethereum contract: it feels as if you are programming not just a computer, but THE computer

reformulation of “computers”—the individual machines like my laptop, or your phone, or the server whirring in the corner of my office — into “compute”, a seamless slab of digital capability. (I like “slab” better than “cloud”, for both its sense of a smooth, opaque surface and its suggestion of real mass and weight.) (cf Personal Cloud)

I recently read David Macaulay’s book Mill, about the construction and growth of a textile mill in Rhode Island in the early 1800s, and, I’ve got to tell you: that mill looks and feels like a data center.
They put data centers near rivers, too!
For me, textiles provide an almost perfect analogy for computing, because they were, centuries ago, THE high-tech industry.

The dutifully critical part of me wants to say: we shouldn’t trust these systems! They will surely fail us. The very signature of the corporate internet is the way it slips from your grasp; being an unreliable partner is like, its definitional characteristic. The leviathans swim after new markets, and what do you get? An end-of-life blog post. Too bad you designed your whole thing to work in the slab...

At the same time: internet trunk lines run alongside railroad tracks. Will the slab operators and their infrastructure still be with us in a hundred years, in SOME form, the way the railroads are?

I think maybe we — that’s the “we” of people interested in the futures, near and far, of computers — ought to go in two directions at once.

First, if somebody offers you a seamless slab of compute and says, here, take a bite: sure, go for it.

At the same time, make plans for the future. There’s an idea simmering out there, still fringe, coaxed forward by a network of artists and hobbyists: it’s called “permacomputing” and it asks the question, what would computers look like if they were really engineered to last, on serious time scales?

As a concrete-ish example, I think this project from Alexander Mordvintsev is lovely, and totally permacomputing: Alexander is the discoverer, in 2015, of the “DeepDream” technique, an early — now iconic — fountain of AI-generative art. You have surely seen examples: images that boil with strange details; whorls of eyeballs where eyeballs should not whorl. Earlier this year, Alexander released a stripped-down implementation of DeepDream written in a vintage dialect of C. It’s programmed to run on a CPU, not a GPU. It will do so very slowly. Who cares? It will run! You could run Alexander’s deepdream.c on a Raspberry Pi. You could probably run it on a smart refrigerator. The implementation does depend on a single pre-trained model file, produced at (then-)great expense by many computers with very fast GPUs.