At the time of this book ’ s publication, no one (certainly not I) can pronounce on the practical validity of quantum computing or industrial-scale atomic-level design, and so for that reason alone, we are careful to separate computation from computers, and not to confuse the mathematical genericity of computation as a process with the actual and comparatively feeble algorithm-crunching machines at work now and in the near future. <sup>10</sup> Surely the latter is a sad cartoon of the former, and Turing ’ s model of a universal computing machine specifies a break between what mathematics could describe as the computation of natural information and what artificial computing technology could ever program or perform. Even supercomputing grids are just machines particularly efficient at calculation tasks at predictable speeds, but they are not in themselves “ computation, ” just as light bulbs are machines good at conducting electrical currents toward illumination but are not in themselves electricity or light. Many things process information algorithmically and could be said to “ compute ” in a meaningful sense (DNA and RNA, for example) without also demanding that we must see in them the reflection of our computing machines. <sup>11</sup> We might even assume that the “ next machines ” (the ones that come after planetary-scale computation) will look less like today ’ s computers and more like biology itself. <sup>12</sup> Turing described a capacity to mimic natural computation, providing a measurement of the gap between it and artificial machinic computation, but as we learn to design by the comingling of bits and atoms into strange hybrids, we may in time need to retake that measurement. <sup>13</sup> Even if so, we will still resist the conflation of the quasi-universality of theoretical computation with the scope of real or near-future computational infrastructure, not to mention the indeterminate geopolitical effects of that infrastructure on those effects. Unfortunately, both utopian and dystopian alliances are happy to underwrite and expand that conflation to support their own deterministic narratives, but for The Stack, we won ’ t. One hopes that instead of dressing up contemporary techniques as ontological principles, an emphasis on the discovery (versus invention) of computation should make the practical distinction between the formal and the functional more apparent. The geopolitical effects of accidental computational megastructures remain design problems precisely because they are not determined by inflated notions about immanent (and imminent) logics.
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