The Quantum Frontier

The success of the abstract model of computation, in terms of bits, logical operations, programming language constructs, and the like, makes it easy to forget that computation is a physical process. Our cherished notions of computation and information are grounded in classical mechanics, but the physics underlying our world is quantum. In the early 80s researchers began to ask how computation would change if we adopted a quantum mechanical, instead of a classical mechanical, view of computation. Slowly, a new picture of computation arose, one that gave rise to a variety of faster algorithms, novel cryptographic mechanisms, and alternative methods of communication. Small quantum information processing devices have been built, and efforts are underway to build larger ones. Even apart from the existence of these devices, the quantum view on information processing has provided significant insight into the nature of computation and information, and a deeper understanding of the physics of our universe and its connections with computation. We start by describing aspects of quantum mechanics that are at the heart of a quantum view of information processing. We give our own idiosyncratic view of a number of these topics in the hopes of correcting common misconceptions and highlighting aspects that are often overlooked. A number of the phenomena described were initially viewed as oddities of quantum mechanics. It was quantum information processing, first quantum cryptography and then, more dramatically, quantum computing, that turned the tables and showed that these oddities could be put to practical effect. It is these application we describe next. We conclude with a section describing some of the many questions left for future work, especially the mysteries surrounding where the power of quantum information ultimately comes from.Comment: Invited book chapter for Computation for Humanity - Information Technology to Advance Society to be published by CRC Press. Concepts clarified and style made more uniform in version 2. Many thanks to the referees for their suggestions for improvement

The meaning of life in a developing universe

The evolution of life on Earth has produced an organism that is beginning to model and understand its own evolution and the possible future evolution of life in the universe. These models and associated evidence show that evolution on Earth has a trajectory. The scale over which living processes are organized cooperatively has increased progressively, as has its evolvability. Recent theoretical advances raise the possibility that this trajectory is itself part of a wider developmental process. According to these theories, the developmental process has been shaped by a larger evolutionary process that involves the reproduction of universes. This evolutionary process has tuned the key parameters of the universe to increase the likelihood that life will emerge and develop to produce outcomes that are successful in the larger process (e.g. a key outcome may be to produce life and intelligence that intentionally reproduces the universe and tunes the parameters of ‘offspring’ universes). Theory suggests that when life emerges on a planet, it moves along this trajectory of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if organisms emerge that decide to advance the evolutionary process intentionally. The organisms must be prepared to make this commitment even though the ultimate nature and destination of the process is uncertain, and may forever remain unknown. Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Humanity’s increasing understanding of the evolution of life in the universe is rapidly bringing it to the threshold of this major evolutionary transition

Human Computation and Convergence

Humans are the most effective integrators and producers of information, directly and through the use of information-processing inventions. As these inventions become increasingly sophisticated, the substantive role of humans in processing information will tend toward capabilities that derive from our most complex cognitive processes, e.g., abstraction, creativity, and applied world knowledge. Through the advancement of human computation - methods that leverage the respective strengths of humans and machines in distributed information-processing systems - formerly discrete processes will combine synergistically into increasingly integrated and complex information processing systems. These new, collective systems will exhibit an unprecedented degree of predictive accuracy in modeling physical and techno-social processes, and may ultimately coalesce into a single unified predictive organism, with the capacity to address societies most wicked problems and achieve planetary homeostasis.Comment: Pre-publication draft of chapter. 24 pages, 3 figures; added references to page 1 and 3, and corrected typ

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

Constructing Futures: Outlining a Transhumanist Vision of the Future and the Challenge to Christian Theology of its Proposed Uses of New and Future Developments in Technology

Transhumanists arc committed to re-evaluating the entire human condition and offering proposalsfor transcending mortality, principally by augmenting the human body with mechanical components or by transferring the human mind into intelligent hyper-computers. In this essay, the author\'s methodology is to critique the culture oftranshumanism, arguing, with Barbour, that all technology is tool whose use is determined by the cultural and socialframeworks within which it is utilized. Transhumanism is characterized as morally ambiguous, extremely individualistic, fixated upon health, vitality, and power, ideological, reductionist, and self-deluded. Its proposed use of technology is, thus, highly suspect and deserves a robust theological response

Digital Theology: Is the Resurrection Virtual?

Many recent writers have developed a rich system of theological concepts inspired by computers. This is digital theology. Digital theology shares many elements of its eschatology with Christian post-millenarianism. It promises a utopian perfection via technological progress. Modifying Christian soteriology, digital theology makes reference to four types of immortality. I look critically at each type. The first involves transferring our minds from our natural bodies to superior computerized bodies. The second and third types involve bringing into being a previously living person, or person who has never existed, within an artificial digital environment. The fourth involves promotion of our lives into some higher level computational reality