The Rant

The Computer Science (CS) community came to some misguided conclusions in the early 20th century regarding what might and might not be possible with computers, but the ramifications—while catastrophic—have largely gone unnoticed.

That is, Alan Turing’s “Halting Problem” scientific theory has been regarded as conclusively proving the limitation of what is computable, and yet the paradox which he describes is so contrived and bizarre that had he not written about it, that scenario he depicts may have never been considered by any human being, for the remainder of human civilisation, other than him. And he provided no compelling evidence that there might even be one more such potential paradox in the entirety of our universe’s existence. And yet we are supposed to believe that there are these hidden paradoxes lurking in the shadows, waiting to sabotage our efforts.

And to make matters worse, the so-called paradox that Turing mentions only makes sense within the contrived world of mathematical logic. All one needs to do, is use regular everyday logic of the common-person and Turing’s paradox ceases to exist. That is, once you abandon the rules regarding decision-problems, where the answer must be a binary response, it becomes easy to imagine a halting machine with no such paradox. All the machine needs, is the ability to say either “maybe this program will halt, if conditions X, Y, or Z are satisfied” or “this program absolutely will never halt under any conditions” and just like magic, the paradox has vanished.

Mathematicians will cry out that I have broken the rules, and that I have described something which is not a “decision-problem”, according to the conventions of mathematical logic. And they would be correct. But they would also be missing the point. And the point is that it is ridiculous to use specialist tools like decision-problems, in order to form the basis of our understanding of what can generally be accomplished in the broader scope of human capability, or worse still: to form our convictions about what is worth attempting. Using a niche tool like decision-problems to understand general phenomena is a kind of logical fallacy called a “faulty generalisation”.

Decision-problems do not represent the broad spectrum of reality. They are a contrived concept created by mathematicians, for the benefit of mathematicians. We need to get past this arrogance that causes people to imply, “My way of doing X is the best way to accomplish Y. Therefore, if my way of doing X is failing, then it is not possible for anybody to accomplish Y by any means.”

This way of thinking, in my opinion, has had tremendous negative side-effects for our society and our economy. It has led to people in the tech world to essentially give up on the pursuit of many things that were merely difficult, but not impossible. But to make matters worse, people in this industry have simultaneously poured literally trillions of dollars into the pursuit of making machines that can replace humans entirely.

Stop and think about that for a second. And think about all the things that are coming out of the Divide By None company. Did you know that the foundations of our technology is based on research that is many decades out of date? And that all of our technology were invented by me? So, just imagine if, in the 1980’s, the many millions of scientists in the world had decided to use that same research to pursue a goal such as this. How might our world look right now? There is no doubt that they would have accomplished far greater things than I ever could alone. But unfortunately, that is not the way history turned out.

Instead we have a widening inequality gap, and we have stagnation throughout virtually all fields of science, except for the development of microchips. And if the AI dystopia is allowed to happen, we all lose many of our human rights, because jobless people do not have the same capacity to claim many of our rights. And if you don't believe me, then I challenge you to give up your current income and live off welfare for 24 months. Let me know how you feel about "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) after you've experienced that.

You probably won’t be able to afford rent (or a mortgage) in a safe area of your choosing. You won’t be able to afford to escape domestic violence. You won’t be able to afford a lawyer in those instances where the police are unwilling or unable to prosecute a victimiser on your behalf. You won’t be able to ask for a pay rise to keep up with inflation. You won’t have enough money left over to support your chosen political candidates or advocacy groups. You won’t have enough money to ensure that you can protect your spouse and children from violent crime. But worst of all, the tech giants want to give human rights to ChatGPT (and other AI technologies) so that you can be sent to jail for murder, if you delete an AI app from your own computer.

However, I do not want to dishearten you, because all hope is not lost. The solution to this problem is simple. Our company will now deliver what the elitist computer scientists refused to bring to you: accessible computing. We promise to try to write documentation that is intuitive, without unnecessary jargon, and without logical leaps. We promise to create content creation and software development tools that are as easy to learn as Microsoft Word or Excel. We promise not to become tyrants, or to engage in “enshitification”.

But above all, we promise to be a democratic organisation as well as a cooperative community where you are a participant and not just a “consumer”. We hope to get your help in making solutions that are flexible enough to adapt to support a diversity of mindsets, opinions and needs.

The logic behind this plan is simple, and is inspired by Frodo’s quest in the Lord of the Rings. If we destroy this excessive disparity of power and knowledge—much like the destruction of Sauron's ring—then this particular kind of evil in general will be permanently weakened, and we can move onto living our best lives. Not even a nuclear bomb could undo the progress we are making. Our enemies would require millions of nuclear bombs dropped on every city in every country to be able to erase this from our minds. We now know that things can be better than this, and our knowledge cannot be deleted or censored.