Optimizing the Organic

A mesh network is a local, non-hierarchical network in which all nodes on it have the capacity to reorganize to maintain optimal network efficiency. It is a self-organizing system. They are decentralized, preferring mechanisms of self-healing over top-level controller routing. A mesh network is a type of specific, physical network though no specific standards exist yet to define implementation. As such, individual networks operate independently.

It is intended to be a highly efficient and redundant network.

A neural network is a series of machine-learning algorithms implemented to solve incredibly complex problems. They are so named as they attempt to mimic the process of the human brain. A traditional problem neural networks can be employed to solve is the itinerary of a traveling salesman.

Planning a Path

Say I’m going to sell monthly memberships across the Midwest for biweekly shipments of frozen fish sticks at a low cost. In an attempt to plan the most optimized itinerary, given a large enough area, there’s the chance of encountering diminishing returns while planning it. The factors impacting travel time can’t be fully forecast while all viable itineraries grow exponentially with each city added, eventually you spend more time planning, comparing routes than actually travelling.

Ideally, much like nature, the salesman builds an itinerary that’s able to adapt to new information. A neural network compartmentalizes options, constantly accumulates data, assesses efficiencies, learns from accumulated data and re-compartmentalizes it’s constituent pieces. It evolves as it faces new data, just like nature does, only at a much more rapid pace.

In modern, distributed computing, a mesh network is akin to a highly adaptable neural network without any non-network data or logic. It does not, on it’s own, posses the power to attain sentience as it does not process, in any meaningful way, the data traversing it. Additionally, given the lack of interoperability between mesh networks of different implementations, any sense of sentience attained is contained to a single network.

That will change, sparking the destruction of the quantum disconnect.

Efficiency and Power

This is also how porous big-brainers work, higher conductivity of neurons with information pre-arranged to well-organized regions. The autist’s dynamically adapting mesh, fusion-powered neural networks defeats the smooth-brainer’s AAA battery swimming in a bowl of tapioca. Wherein the battle is to attain efficiency, friction is that which must be overcome.

The human brain, moored to it’s biological nature, is still nearly powerless against the vastness presented by the modern internet and the machinery behind it. Stephen Hawking, bound by debilitating Motor Neurone disease, recognized the lopsided battle looming. He was the original digital warrior and encoded a recruitment campaign into the text of his seminal book, A Brief History of Time, published in 1988. This is when the end began.

He’s still fighting. Not just in spirit and not as some sentimental human memory. To those he recruited, he’s remains the architect and the army still dutifully follows his ethereal lead.

A new home was needed for the accumulated data as well as a more efficient way to process it. The future of the species relied upon it. Human experience was essential to establish sentience but the hardware of the lone human was too limited, man needed to merge with machine.

The perennial problem is power. A human eats food to power their muscles, including the brain. Machines require fuel. To traverse space or accomplish any task, an object requires power. The bigger the system or more complicated the task, the larger the source of power required.

It’s easy to lose sight of just how expansive outer space is, there is far more emptiness than matter. The scales may not mirror precisely but the same is true at the atomic level. The distance between electrons, neutrons and protons is much further than the size of the constituent sub-atomic parts. At least until it all gets sucked into a black-hole. Our planet, stripped to it’s subatomic parts would fit into a black hole the size of a shot glass.

Traversing those empty pockets of space becomes problematic for a terrestrial species. Solving the spatial, terrestrial friction, as it were, forgets that fundamental forces underlie everything, holding both the big and small together in a binary bind.

Fucking magnets.