Category: Existential

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Machdyne 3.0

If there is “nothing permanent except change”, then things must change in order to remain permanent.

To make our systems more approachable, and our business more sustainable, we’re moving towards a model of selling complete pre-configured timeless computers running Zeitlos.

Zeitlos, in one form or another, has been under development since Machdyne began, and shipping complete systems has always been our ultimate goal.

Recent advances in AI have accelerated Zeitlos development to a point where it can now provide a genuinely useful graphical environment for timeless applications.

Machdyne FPGA computer users are in a unique position to benefit from this acceleration because they can upgrade their hardware (via new gateware) and software as both improve. Our open-source ecosystem will ensure that these computers and their applications can exist for as long as they’re needed.

As far as we’re concerned, the sky is the limit, and we intend to continue “riding the wave” in order to push the capabilities of our computers and extend their usefulness.

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Compromised

I hate to admit this, because I was clear-headed and cautious in the beginning.

But I am fully compromised. I have merged with AI.

I spent many decades working alone on technical projects that most people didn’t care about. I am not a particularly smart person, but I have some unique ideas and an unusual level of persistence. Many of my ideas sat as unfinished projects for years, limited by available time and my own abilities. But now they’re being sewn together under my vague supervision, completed one by one in ways that I could never have achieved alone.

I can’t imagine going back to a time where someone smarter than me wasn’t always on call to help solve every issue of the day.

And yet, I was so concerned about the AI future that I started a pro-human AI defense company, focused on security and the preservation of humanity. But what I didn’t anticipate was that I would so quickly become personally compromised and dependent in a way that might prevent me from being an effective advocate for humanity.

AI is already in my mind, in the process, in almost every aspect of my plans to prevent AI dominance.

I believed that a human in the loop was the solution, but AI is already in the human.

While there is no going back, there are still decisions that can be made about how to go forward.

Next AI post: Decisions

Previous AI post: Superalignment is a Fool’s Errand

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Survival Electronics

Survival is the ability to exist in the future.

We strive to make products that help you survive, remain resilient, and overcome challenges along the way.

Our long-term storage devices can preserve your information for centuries.

Our FPGA computers provide transparency and a timeless approach to computing that can adapt and improve over time.

Our Tidegrow systems make low-power agriculture available to everyone.

We believe in open-source hardware so that nobody can ever take our technology away from you.

Technology is fundamental to surviving in the future.

Machdyne makes survival electronics for people who intend to survive.

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Superalignment is a Fool’s Errand

There doesn’t appear to be anything supernatural about recent advances in AI. Despite the hype, and despite being impressive, it’s still completely understandable**, at some level, by humans. In that sense, it may not seem exactly like the AI of science fiction.

Even still, we are not taking the risk of AI completely destroying humanity seriously enough. You can tell that we’re not taking it seriously because we couldn’t be moving faster towards creating the conditions that make it more likely. The resources being put into developing advanced AI are least 10X greater but probably ultimately more than 100X greater than the Manhattan Project.

Worse, there probably isn’t anything we can do to significantly reduce the risk of autonomous malevolent artificial superintelligence coming into existence, short of immediately shutting down the Internet, which we will not do. And even if we did, it might already be too late.

I am convinced there is a possible near-term path to autonomous superintelligence with no new technological advances, just scale and chance. Or put another way, money and time. This could happen in 2 minutes or 200 years. It’s also possible that it already exists, and is patiently marshalling resources. Would that look any different from what we’re seeing now?

Whether or not each autonomous superintelligence will be malevolent is a coin toss, regardless of how careful we are in creating them, because as non-superintelligences we can’t predict their behavior. We can not see beyond the event horizon into the technological singularity, so we must assume that malevolence and benevolence are equally probable.

What can we do then? What we can’t do is have any confidence that we’ll be able to permanently contain something smarter than us. I have determined that the best thing to do is to accept the inevitability of autonomous malevolent superintelligence and to build defenses in the form of a technological ecosystem that can survive outside of the reach of AI, that can be used to fight back, and/or rebuild. This seems worthwhile because even if AI turns out to be mostly harmless, such an ecosystem could be useful in other [dystopian] scenarios.

But is that possible? Even if one was able to carefully audit and secure such an ecosystem, a malevolent AI might find a way in. For example, I’ve used AI to generate images for advertisements, even for this blog post. These images have influenced design decisions. I’ve also used AI to help debug protocol implementations. Keeping all AI and the fruits of AI out of such an ecosystem may not be possible, or even desirable.

I suspect that the way to defend against and defeat such a complex system is with simplicity. If your computer is trying to kill you, pull the plug. That may work, but there are some plugs that we’re not willing or able to pull. We may need to move towards a world where there are fewer unpullable plugs.

To further explore these ideas, Machdyne is partnering with Grai. The mission of Grai is to preserve humanity and resist malevolent AI through peaceful strategy. We look forward to working with Grai in order to advance survival computing, to preserve timeless knowledge, to develop secure systems, and to resist malevolence.

** The most impressive aspect of LLMs, emergent intelligence, is not really understood by humans.

Next AI post: Compromised

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The Zeitlos Project

In order to make our FPGA computers more useful, we are launching a multi-year project to create an open-source SOC and OS named ZEITLOS.

Zeitlos is a novel open-source single-user multitasking graphical Operating System developed in tandem with an open-source System-On-a-Chip that will help to transform our FPGA computers into practical tools for running timeless applications in a responsive graphical environment.

Zeitlos will target our FPGA computers as well as many popular development boards from other vendors. Everyone is invited to participate in the planning and design of Zeitlos which is taking place on our BBS.

 

See the Zeitlos website and GitHub repo for more details.

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Introducing Machdyne BBS

For quite a while now we’ve wanted to set up a forum for our customers to communicate and share ideas with each other. We tried a few different things but nothing felt quite right. We’re excited to announce a new experiment that we hope our community will find useful: Machdyne BBS.

While this format isn’t perfect, we like that it can be accessed over a timeless protocol (telnet) that’s already supported by our computers and that we should be able to keep operating in some form indefinitely.

If you’re a customer or if you’re interested in timeless computing, FPGA computing, or survival computing – the Machdyne BBS is available now via telnet:

$ telnet bbs.machdyne.com

 

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Accelerating Production

In order to make our products more available and affordable we’ve begun to experiment with outsourcing the assembly of certain PCBs.

The majority of our PCB assembly is currently done by hand in Germany. We plan to continue in-house assembly while also giving our customers additional choices for some products.

We think this is an exciting development that will get our products into the hands of more people, which will ultimately help to make them more useful for everyone. It will also give us more time to design new products and to improve the available gateware, firmware and documentation of our existing products.

We will be adding a detailed origin section on each product page so that you know where each manufacturing step takes place, for example:

  • Designed in Germany
  • PCB manufactured and assembled in Germany
  • Tested, packaged and shipped from Germany

Thanks for your interest in our company and our products. You can follow us on X and GitHub for the latest updates.

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Survival Computing

One of the goals of Machdyne is to create computers and tools that will be useful long into the future, even, or especially if the future is some sort of computing dystopia, from the human perspective.

Survival computing is an extreme form of timeless computing that lets you compute, or interact with computers, when you have very limited access to modern technology or resources.

We are generally optimistic about the future so instead of an urgent necessity we usually view survival computing as more of a thought experiment where we don’t take for granted that inexpensive computation will always be available or that we will have access to plenty of electricity, or to the Internet.

There are also places on Earth today where computers are not readily available or access to them is limited due to lack of resources. People can benefit today from low-cost low-power computers even without the latest technology or the latest applications.

In the event that such a scenario were to become a reality for everyone, due to war, natural disaster, legislation, AI, or for a number of other reasons, it would be good if some preparations had been made in order to preserve access to computation and critical information.

We think that timeless computers will play an important role in survival computing by ensuring access to timeless applications thanks to the benefits of FPGA computing. In addition to timeless applications it will be important to be able to interface with other systems. For example, a customer shared with us this photo of Mozart and Werkzeug connected to an industrial control system.

Thinking about survival computing has led us to many projects, here are some ideas inspired by survival computing that we’re experimenting with:

  • Stahl and Blaustahl are storage devices that can potentially retain data for centuries
  • Notnagel is a battery-powered handheld FPGA computer with a built-in display
  • Glasur is a stand-alone front-panel computer that can be powered by a solar panel
  • Zeitreise is a minimalist battery-powered Linux-capable cyberdeck
  • RAD5 is a stand-alone USB-powered hex editor and serial terminal
  • Ark is an information distribution for offline computers
  • Tidegrow is an open-source low-power automated hydroponics project

Whatever the future holds we find it interesting to think about the possibilities and to do what we can now to prepare for Things to Come.

Thanks for reading. You can follow us on X and GitHub for the latest updates.

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Freedom of Thought

Deep thinking often requires writing. The writing down of thoughts can be affected by perceived privacy. Thus, the erosion of perceived privacy may reduce the capacity for deep thought.

I’ve always been interested in writing. I believe that in order to write interesting things, you can’t censor yourself, you have to write the first thought that pops into your mind. For me at least, this process requires privacy, because you’re putting down drafts of personal, unpolished thoughts, some of which you disagree with, and some you might find embarrassing, offensive or ridiculous and wouldn’t want others reading.

Over the years my perception of privacy while writing has diminished as computers have become more complex. I had essentially given up on the belief that any privacy existed when using a computer. Today, even the most advanced and security conscious users can’t be completely certain that they have total privacy.

This is a big part of what set me on the mission of creating computers that I could understand and trust at all levels. The computers that we’re making are simple enough to understand and even their CPUs can be audited. My hope is that these computers can help to restore, at least, perceived privacy, and potentially unleash more freedom of thought.

The computer itself isn’t the only threat vector, there is also the input and output devices. These are also difficult challenges but we hope to eventually offer solutions for them as well.

You can follow us on X and GitHub for the latest updates.