(This is the 1,000th post to Network Address since its inception in 2010)
Every so often, I find my reservoir of bat cave crazy shit running low, and I run a search for lectures via the Santa Fe Institute. This time, after watching the brain-scrambling presentation by Raissa M. D'Souza from UC Davis via Northwestern, and the resulting unintentional revelation about Dragon King events in chaos theory not being integrated into current climate models, I find this:
"The Anthropic Engine" by Dr Manfred Laubichler of Arizona State University and Santa Fe Institute in 2024. He talks about how during the pandemic he found himself with much less to do, and decided to come up with a metric to assign to human endeavour, and ends up combining energy and information to tell us that 1975 was a turning point in human history, and he adds a positive prophecy about the coming climate catastrophe, that a socio-global correction is in order.
My tank is overflowing now, thank you Santa Fe Institute (and Vienna Complexity Hub). But this only introduces the current issue. I go back to find the url for the video. I type the guy's name, the title of the talk, the name of the university, nothing. All different permutations, nothing. If you can't find it, maybe it doesn't exist. It used to be the case that if it was on the internet, you could find it, you just had to tune your search. But then the internet got too big, and the search engines too greedy (THE search engine) and it started to eat itself, and now we can't find anything.
Images: Above is a series of screenshots from three search engines for the term "Anthropic Engine"; none of them - Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google - found the result we were looking for.
When was the last time you searched for something and got zero results? It's been a long time. And these are the things that excite me more than anything, so you bet I'm paying attention. A few years ago I thought, "Thermodynamic Hallucinations"? Not a single result. So I make the result; I generate a single simple post with that phrase in the title. I now own that phrase, right? Wrong. Weeks later, I type that same phrase, and get nothing. Like I said, the internet (as we knew it) is broken. Note that as of this writing, which was Feb 1 2024, the above phrase was found on bing and duck but not google (and you can see the post here).
So today, after my Anthropic Engine discovery, I'm on a roll, and I pump my perennial cyber-barometer into the engine (search engine not anthropic engine) and to my surprise, after waiting long enough, I now own that phrase also. Most other instances have either died due to link rot, or to google-rot, likely both. And it's a big day here at Network Address, the weblog that started as a dematerialized instantiation of the mass transference device itself, and which is today generating its 1,000th post after 10 years. The rematerialization of the anthroposphere is complete. Start your engines (all of them).
Images: Above is a series of screenshots from three search engines for the term "Mass Transference Device"
Notes:
1. "Complex Networks with Complex Nodes: Emergent Behaviors and Control". Raissa D'Souza, Professor and Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering, University of California, Davis. Oct 4 2023. https://nico.northwestern.edu/news-events/events/index.php?eid=603965
2. The Anthropic Engine, Dr Manfred Laubichler, Arizona State University and Santa Fe Institute, 2024.
Thumbnail image credit: AI Art - Artificial Meat_1 - 2024
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