Human evolution explained by Computer evolution

Humans have come a long way in answering the question of how we got to current state. Darwin's theory of evolution is widely recognized as the best answer known today. There are a lot of outstanding questions though: what is the meaning of life? What is consciousness? God? This blog by no means an answer to these questions, but a point of view for discussion. Stephen Wolfram in his book "A New Kind of Science " proposes a new way of explaining complex behavior in nature. Instead of trying to explain the universe, life and other complex topics using physics and mathematics based equations and explanations, he suggests using simple computational models with one or more variables iterated several times to generate patterns and comparing to the patterns that have been created naturally over billions of years on earth. Is the evolution of computing a model that may shed light on human evolution.

Now that the evolution of computers is knocking on the door of consciousness, does the evolution of computing help us extend our understanding of human evolution. Figures 1 shows a timeline of human evolution based on Darwins theory of evolution and figure 2 shows a timeline of computing evolution. These are generic images from the Internet and not original material. 

Figure 1: Timeline of human evolution 

Figure 2: Timeline of Computing Evolution

In less than 100 years, developments in computing technology have mirrored human evolution. Single cell organisms are represented by transistors and capacitors and other electronic components, some of the earliest computers are literally known as dinosaurs. Increasing complexity of electronic chips is comparable to the increasing complexity of organs in the various species that preceded us humans. Computers of today are still lacking the human capabilities such as emotions, consciousness. Maybe computing evolution is at the level of monkeys in the human evolution timeline. Some interesting comparisons:

- a complete sets of hardware components make a computer just like our body parts make us

- the software programs makes a computer alive just like the life within us. More about this later

- flow of electrons can be compared to the flow of blood and nervous energy in our body

- failure of a critical disk or CPU in a computer leads to its death just like the failure of heart or lungs can lead to death of humans

- connections between chips are the arteries and vein

- CPU is the brain sending instructions to all other parts

- programs and data compare to the memory and knowledge in brain that directs our actions

- programming language instructions are equivalent to genes and DNA and chromosomes

- Programs are a sequence of programming language statements similar to gene sequences. We discovered the importance of genome sequencing not too long ago, even though we have been writing computer programs for much longer. 

- internet connected computers all over the world just like the explorers of yesteryears discovered the various civilizations and connected them.

I am sure we can come with a lot more parallels between human life and computing.

So what is the big deal? There are some similarities between human and computing, so what. It gives us a whole host of hypothesis to test for answering the questions about ourselves. For example we have been working hard to uncover the mysteries of our brain. We are making progress but can we learn from the computing models to solve the brain puzzle. Let's dwell on this idea in some detail. What we are doing in brain research today is to study the flow of information over neurons and doing things like functional MRI. Imagine a computer of the future trying to discover how the computer works by looking at the flow of electrons or even analyzing the machine code to understand the complex tasks it can process in a microsecond. Wouldn't it be better for future computer to learn the programming language than to decode it by going backwards from machine code. Sounds like human genome sequencing efforts may helps us solve the brain puzzle faster.

The computing evolution to human evolution comparison leads us to challenge some of our common beliefs. For example Darwin theory of evolution did a great job of documenting the sequence of species as they evolved. There are some remanants of "Natural Selection" vs "intelligent design" debate but most people are in the camp of Natural Selection. Without much proof I am not ready to discredit the theory of Natural Selection, but the computing equivalent today is being managed by human by fixing bugs in computer software and hardware and creating bigger and better computers. Some day in future, computers will certainly be creating other computers. Just to go out on a limb, if the humans lose to the machines in the future and humans are eliminated, a smart computer may some day propose a theory similar to natural selection that explains how they got to be so smart, not knowing that once there existed humans that created them. The flip side is that the computing evolution to human evolution parallel may not check out, but further investigation seems to be warranted.