Computational mottainai

For the past few months I have been slowly working on designing and building my own 8-bit computer, something I should have been blogging about and soon will. As part of this project, and especially fueled by recent conversations with a friend, I've been thinking a lot about the state of modern computing, and what other states computing could possibly be in, and what state I personally would like it to be in. I've taken some inspiration from Stanislav Datskovskiy and his Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing - prescribing the obviously desirable properties of computers in advance and then thinking about what kind of machines could be built within those constraints.

I was doing some idle research today to try and think of a sufficiently pretentious name for my homebrew computer project which captured some of the vision I've been developing, and I came across the Japanese term mottainai. Mottainai conveys "a sense of regret concerning waste". This word has apparently been popularised in the West recently by a Kenyan environmentalist, in the obvious sense of urging people not to waste non-renewable resources. But there are "fuller" meanings of the term, which Wikipedia sketches as such:

A more elaborate meaning conveys a sense of value and worthiness and may be translated as "do not destroy (or lay waste to) that which is worthy."

Buddhists traditionally used the term mottainai to indicate regret at the waste or misuse of something sacred or highly respected, such as religious objects or teaching

its full sense conveys a feeling of awe and appreciation for the gifts of nature

In this sense mottainai is less "don't waste that!", and more "don't waste that!". This gets nicely at one part of the way I feel about computers. The rest of this post may sound a bit silly at times, but I'm being sincere.

I'm an utterly secular, materialist (not materialistic) guy and so nothing is truly sacred or holy or magical to me, but I do have something bordering on a religious awe for computers and I often feel like there is something deeply wrong about the way the they have become such undervalued, disposable commodities. I see old computers discarded on suburban curbs (presumably replaced by a new one because it "got slow", which is physically absurd) and feel a tremendous sense of waste. In some sense, this is stupid: people wouldn't dump computers on the curb if they could make any significant amount of money selling them, and the fact that they can't make any significant amount of money selling them makes it clear that there isn't any kind of scarcity of computers. We can make these things very cheaply, and everyone owns several, so they aren't precious and rare gems. But in most Western countries, food is cheap and abundant and almost everybody has enough of it. In fact, many of us have too much of it. Despite this, if you saw perfectly good, edible food sitting on the curb, you'd feel some sense of wrongness, because it's perfectly good food for crying out loud. This is how I feel about discarded computers (most of which are still perfectly good, regardless of what terrible software has convinced their former owners of). That discarded food could be eaten by somebody, and that discarded computer could be computing something - in fact, it could be computing anything and that's kind of the whole point. This sense of wasted potential has actually moved me to "rescue" curb computers, even if I end up rarely or never using them myself, because the thought of them being crushed up and buried as landfill just seems so incontrovertibly wrong.

Our personal computers are universal Turing machines: single machines which, once built, can perform any information processing task under the sun, without any change to their internal construction at all. They can add numbers, or sort lists, or spell check documents, manipulate sound and images, simulate the motion of the planets, or the tides, or any other physical process you care to name, and with the appropriate hardware connected they can control factories and fly planes. The same machine can do all of these things, and in ten years time when someone thinks of some new kind of information processing that was undreamed of at the time the machine was made, the machine will be able to do that too, without the hardware needing to be touched at all. You'll not encounter anything closer to magic in your life. The fact that such remarkable, limitless machines are possible in principle, and that we humans can make them small and fast and cheap is not some fundamentally necessary fact of the universe. It could be otherwise! The fact that it isn't otherwise is really something like a blessing - a gift of nature, and we should treat it as such. Inside every computer, even a ten year old one which is now "useless", is a tiny silicon miracle, something so utterly unlikely that most people would probably insist that nothing like it ever could exist, if only they weren't surrounded by examples to the contrary. It's a crying shame to throw out a perfectly working machine that contains infinite potential inside of it without a hint of regret, just because you can now easily buy a new machine which has a little bit more infinite potential inside of it.

Mottainai!