Will Binns
@wbnns
Founder @mruspace • ran bitcoin.org, led teams @coinbase • editor of Mastering Bitcoin & Mastering Ethereum • software that outlives its makers
In the not-so-distant future, a probe with nobody to call will face a similar choice
This was a great rehearsal that went according to plan
Our software successfully ran on an ESA satellite for the second time on October 22.
Its three copies failed one by one as planned. When the last one went bad, it stopped rather than give a wrong answer.
Then we shut the program off without warning. It restarted where it left off, with 0 wrong results.
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Most software assumes someone will be around to fix it
Ours assumes nobody will be
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An essay I wrote about @mruspace is one of 27 picked to be featured in the Long Now Foundation's upcoming Book of Time, due out next spring
Long Now Foundation
@longnow
4d
Announcing our first Long Now Labs awardees in partnership with the Protocol Institute. We received 370+ exceptional submissions — and we’re thrilled to unveil the three awardees chosen to develop their concepts into prototypes. The awardees for Book of Time are:
▪️Matthew Caren https://t.co/bgCLBK5gOU
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I think about whoever writes this code
They'll choose for all of us, and never see what they chose
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Centuries from now, a machine built in our lifetime will spend its last watt on a world nobody has seen
We're writing the code that decides when
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We're turning the team into code for machines that will never have one
For nearly fifty years, a team at NASA has been switching off Voyager's instruments one at a time. Not because they failed. Because there was not enough power to run them all, and somebody had to choose the order.
That choosing has been done by people, in meetings, with decades of experience behind it.
We are trying
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We're building a future full of machines in places we cannot go
Each one will leave with a version of us inside it
Anything that runs down without resupply has the same problem. A fuel tank, a stockpile, a satellite with a finite amount of thruster fuel. Spend it now or save it for later.
Usually somebody revisits that call as things change. Prices move, plans shift, a person reconsiders.
On a machine nobody can reach, the call g
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Over decades we've gotten very good at telling machines how to notice things
But nobody taught them what to do about it
We are
On a machine nobody can reach, power is not something you monitor. It is something you have to spend on purpose.
So we built a gate. Every part of the system asks before it does anything, and the answer can be no.
Your laptop knows its battery percentage. It does not refuse to run something because of it. That gap is
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There is a machine somewhere right now, in a place nobody can get to, slowly running down with nobody coming
There will be a great many more of them, and that is the whole reason our work exists
We write software for machines nobody can reach. The clearest case is a craft sent to another star, but it is not the only one.
There will be more of them. Sensors under ice sheets. Monitors inside places we sealed on purpose. Equipment on the seabed that was never meant to come back up.
We are going to put a lot of
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We've spent the entire history of computing building tools for not losing data
We have almost none for choosing what to lose when losing is certain
So we're building it
Nobody designs for forgetting. We design storage, backups, redundancy, all of it aimed at keeping things.
A machine nobody can repair has to do the opposite. Its memory corrupts faster than it can be fixed, it will lose something either way. The only question is what.
We are building the part that decides.
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Most of software engineering is making this trade without naming it
Naming it is most of what we are doing differently
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For forty thousand years we as humans have left things behind
Carvings, books, records
This is the first time what we leave behind can act on its own
The strangest part of this work is how much of it is deciding things on behalf of people who are not born yet.
What counts as interesting. What is worth the power to send home. What gets switched off first when there is not enough.
None of those are software problems. They are judgment, written down, by people who wi
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There is no race here
The only risk is building the wrong thing carefully
The fix for that is letting people look
Everything we are doing is public. The paper, the code, the simulation models, all of it.
Not because open source is a strategy. Because nobody has solved this and we are not going to be the ones who do it alone. If somebody reads the paper and tells us the radiation model is wrong, that is worth more to us than keepi
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Every explorer who ever went out came back with a position or did not come back at all
This one does both
Near the end of a four hundred year journey, a craft runs out of power for almost everything. No instruments. Nothing left to look at anything with.
What it can still do is send a heartbeat and a position. I am still here.
That phase gets designed too. The last thing it does should still be worth doing.
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