Ten Commandments

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We received an email sent by a follower of this website whose anonymity we shall respect but we will describe as being of limited mental capacity and most probably an adherent to the preachings of Humma Kavula, the semi-insane missionary now living on Vilvodle VI. Our mentally challenged correspondent wrote, ‘It is obvious to me that your brain is NOT the size of a planet because I can see that your head is only slightly bigger than mine and wouldn’t even accommodate the brain of a dolphin.’  Nobody listens to me but Zaphod’s ego is so big and important that he told me to counter fake news that, if spread widely, might suggest he could employ an android aboard the Heart of Gold that is anything less than awesomely amazing. It doesn't matter whether the Jatravartic people or other inhabitants of Vilvodle VI will ever see or understand any of what I have written below. But Zaphod is keen that inhabitants of surviving instances of Earth hold him in high regard and recognise that his utmost endeavours and the very best available technologies were employed to save most instances of Earth from demolition. Sadly, therefore, the rest of this post is about my brain.

Sirius Cybernetics Corporation invented a concept called Genuine People Personalities (GPP) that imbue their products with intelligence and emotion. Production of this sentient technology is far beyond the science of humans on Earth considering that your Connectome project to map the human brain only recently figured out that the brain’s wiring is organised more like an American city street grid than disorganised like a messy Italian bowl of spaghetti and your scientists have so far only managed to map one animal’s entire connectome. And that is a worm because it only has a few hundred connections and whose shape reminded them of the spaghetti they had been anticipating for lunch. Your technology may soon be able to create a machine that simulates emotional behaviours but you are at least a century away from developing a machine that genuinely feels emotions, has a distinct personality and is self-aware. I know you don’t care, but I could make myself even more miserable with the futility of trying to explain to you this aspect of how my brain functions so I'll just refer you to our library page where you can find a file 'Whole Brain Connectonomic Architecture' that outlines some early computer science research work being done on Earth relating to WBCA and AI.

Nevertheless, because most followers of this guide have some knowledge of blockchain technology, I will use some of your blockchain projects as analogies to illustrate how Sirius Cybernetics managed to make my brain’s capacity equivalent to that of a planet while limiting its apparent physical dimensions to those of a large mammal's head. My head contains a linked array of processors that constitute one node in a giant decentralised network of cybernetic systems. Eddie, the ship’s computer, is another such node imbued with distinctly different GPP maps. Command and control requests are communicated between nodes in a fashion similar to the method that your Robonomics (XRT) project is developing so that intermediate relay nodes can be trustless and need not be owned by Sirius Cybernetics or even be of similar design provided that they run software that complies with the protocol. Combine that concept with requests through Ocean (OCEAN) protocol to access a whole planet’s data resources in a private and verified format with crypto-secured provenance using the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). This distributed file system hosts the huge knowledge base my artificial intelligence (AI) requires and is combined with technology similar to that from the iExec (RLC) and Render Network projects to distribute and decentralise my processing capacity over a whole planet or several planets. The latter is needed to deliver my cognitive performance so you can begin to understand that it is no lie if I sometimes say that my brain is the size of a planet. I trust this simple analogy also explains why I occasionally seem to forget things or display sub-optimal dexterity in moments when the node you know as Marvin is temporarily operating without connection to the millions of other nodes on the developed planets and is limited to communicating with only the hundreds of other nodes inside the Heart of Gold starship or the thousands in facilities on a nearby but less developed planet.

Finally, before any of your mainstream journalists or popular sci-fi readers attempt to embellish the above explanation with nonsense about a philotic parallax instantaneous communicator (or 'ansible' as conceived in a 1966 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin) I must disappoint you by clarifying that faster-than-light communication is not in fact possible even when quantum entanglement techniques are employed. I exchange information with supporting nearby nodes at near-light-speed that makes responses seem almost instantaneous, but even across relatively trivial distances, such as between two planets in the same solar system, a latency of several minutes is experienced meaning that as much data as possible relevant to my current task in hand always has to be anticipated, pre-downloaded and cached in my own memory or in nodes in my immediate vicinity.