Our Computers Are Made of Meat
This is an unofficial sequel to Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made out of Meat”. I sent it to Terry Bisson when I wrote it back in 2004 and he enjoyed it. I’ve also posted it elsewhere, but am consolidating some of my past writing to this blog. Enjoy!
Our Computers Are Made of Meat
Wow, I didn't think they'd ever leave!
Yeah, that was a close call. If they'd stuck around any longer, they would've discovered our entire operation for sure.
No kidding. Those surveyors are supposed to locate and contact newly intelligent worlds, but thank goodness even they were completely disgusted by these sentient meat creatures.
Well, they are pretty revolting.
Ain't that the truth! I can still barely get over it--intelligent beings made out of nothing but oozing liquids and squishy membranes. Frankly, I don't envy you operations folks working out here so close to them. I'm happy being a bean counter back at headquarters. Yuck.
Very true, but they're the key to our profits!
Well, that's why I'm here for your thousand year review of revenue and expenses. Thanks for taking the time to show me the operations.
Happy to do my part. You'll see that we run a really tight ship here. Basically, we're running a contract data processing center using these meat computers in a distributed computing model. Each meat brain is relatively weak, about 100 trillion operations per second, but by splitting up the processing into smaller chunks to be run in parallel, we can undertake very complex, large-scale processing. Each brain is only about 1.5 kilograms, but requires a mobile meat container weighing 80 kg on average, so they're not very mass efficient. We refer to the whole thing, the brain and its container as a meat. But the upside is that the meat is extremely energy efficient--each meat requires only about 100 watts to operate. That's right, they can do a trillion data operations on a single watt of energy! Of course, we can build more energy efficient computers, but that would require us to actually build them! Imagine the crazy luck when our VC-drones stumbled upon this remote and otherwise useless planet with 5 billion of these meat things just sitting around doing nothing! Running at 33% utilization, our current benchmark, that comes to over 14 thousand yottabits per day. I've already mentioned how energy efficient they are, but the best part is that the meat gathers its own organic fuel. We don't even have to maintain them!
Can you explain why utilization is only 33%? That seems quite inefficient.
The meat brains actively operate only 2/3 of each planetary cycle, directing their containers to collect and consume fuel, to make copies of themselves, and a variety of other seemingly random and useless activities. For the remaining 1/3 of each day, the meat, both brain and container are inactive. It's during this downtime that we load and run programs in the meat brains via femtowave transmission.
What do you mean they're inactive?
They just shut down. They don't do anything.
I can understand if the meat container needs to refuel or repair itself, but why does the processor need to be inactive? I find it extraordinary that any sentient lifeform would evolve so that its brain shuts down for a third of every planetary revolution. It's a complete waste! What's the point of it?
Haha! The point is more money for us!
Heh heh. Well, that's true. By charging our customers market rates for computing resources, and paying nothing for the processing time, it's like money lying on the ground for the taking. But there's something I'm curious about: if we weren't running our distributed computing program, would the meat have any mental activity during their daily downtime? What I mean to ask is, do meat computers dream during organic sleep?
Sure, but their dreams are completely disorganized, there's probably no recognizable patterns, and certainly nothing like the elaborate, object-oriented program logic that we load in there.
Aren't you afraid that the meat will find these dream programs disturbing or that they'll figure out that they're being externally manipulated? I mean, don't they find it weird that so many of them have similar dreams?
Well, they interpret the program objects and processes as other meat and events from their waking lives. It's all a random, illogical mishmash that they can't make heads nor tails of. Plus, we coordinate so that co-located meat don't run the same program during the same cycle. If we have to violate that precaution to meet a big deadline, we make sure they forget enough of their dreams so that they can't compare them too closely. Plus, meat is just not that bright.
Still, is what we're doing really right? I mean, stealing processing cycles is a crime, isn't it?
Of course, stealing computing time is wrong. Hijacking someone's brain and controlling their thoughts is the worst violation imaginable. It's a far worse crime than any form of physical violence. But it's not like these meat beings are real people. They can hardly control their own thoughts when they're awake, and certainly not while they're sleeping. It's not stealing if they're not using their brains in the first place! Plus, they don't even know what's being done to them, so what's the harm? If anything, we're doing them a favor by doing something productive with their brains. Heaven knows they don't ever do anything useful with them.
Okay, I see your point. And even if we're not doing anything illegal, we sure don't want to share these meat computers with anyone else, do we?
Heck no. We found 'em first, and we're gonna keep this little gold mine a company secret as long as we can.
No question about that! So what are you running tonight?
A batch of the usual stuff. First, we've got the relativistic gravitational modeling. That's one of our oldest data sets.
Ah yes, the "Falling and Flying" series. The clients have asked how much longer until the results will be available?
Oh, another two thousand years or so, but tell them three. Better to underpromise and overdeliver. Oh, and we're ramping up volume on the quantum incompleteness queries.
Oh, that new "I Forgot to Wear Pants" analysis! We've booked very healthy revenue on it already.
Yes, that one's been giving us some very promising results. And tonight, we're doing an inner join against "I Forgot to Study for the Final Exam". That one's really new, only a few hundred years. It's a replacement for "Forget Bring Spear to Hunt" that started returning null data a while ago.
Gosh, I must say that getting out here to the front lines is much more interesting than I expected. I always assumed it was just shoving data into the meat and letting them run.
Oh, far from it! They're really quite temperamental. It's more of an art than a precise science.
Well, we appreciate your hard work keeping things running smoothly here. You're our most profitable division, thanks in no small part to your expertise with these meat computers. Do you see any major challenges or opportunities on the horizon?
Well, the meat computers are getting less efficient with time--we used to run a solid 33% daily utilization, but they seem to sleep less and less all the time, and many of them have started using chemical sleep inducements which makes it impossible to load the programs. Fortunately, the number of meat keeps multiplying all the time and that's certainly not slowing down, so our overall output continues to increase. At some point, we'll probably max out, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
According to your figures, these meat computers basically cost us nothing to operate, so you should remain quite profitable barring any unforeseen efficiency decreases. Sure, at some point we'll have to consider reallocating resources, but that's not going to be for quite a while.
Hmmm...
Did I say something troubling? No need for worry; everything seems in order and I'll be submitting a very positive report.
Oh, it's not that. I was just wondering what it'll be like for them, the meat, that is, when some day they suddenly stop having dreams.
Oh my, I think you've been working with this meat too long. It's not like they are true intelligences. When one of us powers down, who knows what happens to our true essence? Does the abstract truth of our self-looping, information super-pattern persist when we enter the sudden, mysterious blackness of non-computation? I doubt anything so profound could happen to this meat when it shuts down for the night. It's just meat, after all.












