Digital with Analog Override

Yours truly has always thought reality is digital with analog override given that the building blocks of life are digital, as seen by DNA using a 4 letter data set (ATCG) to codify information and energy, needed by life & other processes, being distributed throughout the universe in discrete packets (Quantum Mechanics) but there's a twist as subatomic particles, and atoms, exist in a state of superposition (unless decohered), constantly varying in states (wave/particle) depending on its environment, operating in analogous fashion to analog, a process that measures the continuously variable physical quantities of a given system.  Note: Digital counts, Analog measures. Note II: Entanglement is not part of this blurb though it may give rise to reality itself if new research regarding worm holes proves to ring true. :)

Wavefunctions of the electron in a hydrogen atom at different energy levels. Quantum mechanics cannot predict the exact location of a particle in space, only the probability of finding it at different locations.[1] The brighter areas represent a higher probability of finding the electron.

For life to function, there must be slippage, the ability to adapt and interact with the noisy environment in realtime, along the lines of the OODA loop or die, something that is not the case as seen by the myriad of life forms on planet earth. In order to life to do this, analog rules as seen by the OODA loop diagram whereby the ability to stay alive depends on observation of chaotic outside events, adaptive interaction with the environment, proper response to feedback loops driven by the environment and intelligent decision making based on an ever changing situation filled with uncertainties, something beyond the kin of baseline digital computation as seen by the rise of neural nets, the front end analog engine of AI. 

The OODA Loop

Why all this palaver? Well, two reasons, one is the move Her, a wonderful film of a guy falling in love with an AI only to see her go beyond the realm of man into a space shared with other AIs, never to be seen again and two, a provocative Edge article penned by George Dyson titled Childhood's End  discussing AI as an entity already beyond our control, a notion shared by this author without question.

All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail.

The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?

Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.

All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail.

Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. A small number of people and companies who helped spawn self-replicating codes became some of the richest and most powerful individuals and organizations in the world.

Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution, an analog revolution, has begun. None dare speak its name.

What people tend to miss is, it's not just one AI like Google's Deep Mind or IBM's Watson society is facing, it's millions being developed as there is simply too much money to be made not to do so, something rather disquieting to say the least as these said entities are linked to the net, the petri dish of petri dishes when it comes to data, the perfect place for analog/digital constructs to evolve into entities beyond the control of us, something that's already happening as we move further into the 21st century.