The Gap in Computer Science




Computer science turned life upside down and inside out. Worse is to come unless action is taken. We live in a digital envelope that abstracts traditional human power into global software designed by others or even by AI. Software’s invisible powers automate life and inevitably individuals, small and large organizations and governments are dramatically changed. Unfortunately, the side effects of computer science have complicated life. The digital envelope is opaque and riddled with malware. Worse still, the envelope is biased against democratic society, designed by and for digital dictators as an Orwellian endgame to civilized progress. It is unacceptable and it must be changed.

Computers cannot be trusted because the digital envelope is flawed. Plagued by hidden malware and peppered with undetected digital corruption, it is impossible to fully understand or use democratically. At the lowest level, proprietary digital solutions and branded operating systems fight for dictatorial supremacy using opaque and complex alternatives to pure science. Even experts cannot understand other suppliers’ solutions. 

As the ultimate harbinger of future society, binary computers are unfaithful. They are not scientific. If they were, necessarily they would be flawless, faithful to the perfect science of mathematics and logic.

Computer science, like mathematics and logic, should serve society as obedient servants, not dictatorial masters surrounded by criminal henchmen. The unintended consequence of proprietary computers fosters the collapse of democracy in society. The synthetic layer is digitally flawed, every brand is vulnerable to corruption and undetectable damage. All too easily corrupted by friends and enemies, they cannot be allowed to function as the global platform of the future. In every important way they undermine the democratic nations of the world. As the international platform of co-existence, warring nations warp proprietary binary computers to their own selfish interests causing endless harm to global society until nothing can be trusted.

Ultimately, democratic society depends on mutual trust, and natural science is the anchor of trust. But relentless digital attacks undermine every standard of civilization. Before they ruin the world, individuals in democratic nations must be digitally secure. Computer science must be democratized scientifically for all to appreciate and understand. Incomprehensible proprietary computers must be banned. Only flawless, transparent computer science can guarantee our shared future on Earth.

Furthermore, flawless mathematics and logic when implemented functionally (instead of digitally) are by definition, fair and democratic to all. It is urgent. Binary computers make the digital envelope flawed. It is failing humanity. Only flawless science prevents the bad guys winning and only the highest engineering standards can serve society forever.

The binary computer is an incomplete, one-sided version of computer science. As defined in 1936 by the Church-Turing Thesis, on one side there is Alonzo Church’s logical, symbolic computational model of Lambda-Calculus, while on the other side is Alan Turing’s physical model of imperative machine instructions assembled as a linear, sequential program. When after World War II, John von Neumann built the Maniac he excluded Alonzo Church's mechanisms for flawless mathematical logic, and the rest of the world followed suit.

Without the symbolic binding of Lambda-Calculus, vital data privacy and perfect functionality is lost. Instead, critical data is shared in a central memory unit accessed by unrelated programs. A dangerous proprietary concoction adequate for stand-alone mainframes took-off. They only worked in locked rooms for the simplified mono-functionality of batch-processing shift work through the 1960s.  

Only the centralized operating system stands between success and failure, but none of them is perfect. When microprocessors begat the PC revolution, networked hacking led to malware. When the Internet browser exploded, remote access exposed undetectable hacks and consequential criminal opportunities. Still the advantages outweighed the risks until superhuman AI software automated global corruption, accelerated the successful attack rate, driving surprise attacks to a superhuman complexity level.

The problem is a vulnerability gap that exists between machine code mistakes made by the binary computer and later on error detection. Some errors are never detected automatically or can only be detected by a human user, others are found as inconsistency in an application. Some are found by asynchronous monitors or the operating system. Unfortunately, none are found by the binary instruction because they are imperative commands. Only hardware errors can be found by a binary computer. It is the nature of the binary computer.

Software errors cannot be discovered by the imperative machine commands of a binary computer. All such errors must be found in advance by a language compiler, or later when the system crashes during testing. Neither approach is adequate for the future of civilized society and neither approach deals with outside interference injected by criminals and enemies as malware deliberately designed to evade detection. Ransomware attacks demonstrate the futility of all present defense mechanisms for all forms of branded, binary computer systems.

There is only one way to deal with this dilemma. The gap in computer science that fails to detect both logical and physical errors must be reduced to zero by comprehensive on-the-spot checks. Central operating systems, privileged hardware mechanisms, compiled virtual machines, virtual memory, and software monitors only expand the vulnerability gap. As a result, foreign enemies, criminal gangs, governments, and unelected self-interests exploit the unguarded breach between execution time and error detection time. If the gap remains, or worse expands, errors cannot be detected, and the bad-guys succeed at the expense of society.

The only way to close the gap in binary cyberspace to zero is the scientific way and use functional machine instructions that align with the Church-Turing Thesis. Functional instructions do not use imperative physical addressing outlined by Alan Turing and adopted by the Maniac. Instead, symbolic names identify logical targets in a namespace. The namespace defines the functional components of a programmed application. Each functional machine instruction can be engineered to be fail-safe by detecting both physical and logical errors on-the-spot, prior to any mistake.

Despite significant technological progress, neither industry nor government shows a serious intent to shrink the error detection gap and solve the problem. Crime is the curse of the binary computer, invented in the hurry to be first by John von Neumann in 1946. It only worked for standalone mainframes, locked in rooms and without public network connections. Used in the global internet, the gap is a resident flaw exploited by networked criminals and enemies.

There is no gap between physical execution time and logical error detection time in a Church-Turing machine because Alonzo Church's Lambda Calculus binds the physical conditions of the atomic Turing Machine, as the engine to each logical symbols of any scientific expressions. At the point of execution both physical and logical conditions are checked before the instruction is completed, in advance of making any mistake.

Thus, there is no gap when an atomic Turing Machine, the simplest binary computer, is the computational engine of a symbolic, scientific statement. If every machine instruction obeys the Lambda calculus (aka λ-calculus), the formal system of mathematics and logic applies to express each computation as a function abstraction (aka an Object-Oriented Program). The identified symbols have unique names. The application computes as known variables dynamically bound to the atomic computer using variable substitution. It is a universal model of computation that exploits the Turing machine as a binary computer without any unregulated sharing.

The fatal gap completely disappears when the universal model of computation replaces all the unscientific baggage of the mainframe age starting with the dictatorial, centralized operating system. It is the harbinger of Orwellian society. Instead, operating system functions must exist independently as individual function abstractions. Then even critical functions execute only when needed limited by the access rights of individual computational threads. Limited power is fairly distributed to private threads. The superuser is avoided, and undetected crimes, enemy interference from simple malware to the manipulation of domestic affairs, and the growth of industrial monopolies are all resolved by the universal democratic fairness of mathematical science. The is the way self-obsessed digital calamities are avoided.

Individuals, organizations, and nations are secured by the scientific equality of true computer science, implemented as individually secure function abstractions, isolated in private execution threads. Nothing is exposed because logic and physics are united at the point-of-execution. The unscientific, uncalibrated failure rate of compiled software is decomposed into calibrated, well tested digital objects, functional servants to their users.

While binary computers work against society, they undermine the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The computer industry leaders make every important decision. They create digital dictatorships, enforced by unfair hardware privileges invented for virtual memory and other unscientific paraphernalia for the centralized operating system and its subordinate followers. Individual freedom is decapitated in cyberspace, liberty is constrained, criminals win, democracy is fragmented, and the unelected digital dictators become irresistible global monopolies.

The world cannot progress imprisoned by these unelected dictators wasting time defending one sided computer science. But flawless science defines a globally fair solution. Although the Church-Turing Thesis preceded von Neumann’s Maniac by a decade it was the path not taken. Instead, the path chosen led to global insecurity. By example, Christopher Ray, head of the FBI told Congress in January 2023 that the actions of the Chinese Communist Party, (CCP) are the defining threat of our generation and the risk posed by cyberattacks requires immediate resolution. The People’s Republic of China, the PRC, he continued, target critical infrastructure in the United States, from water treatment plants, electrical grids, oil and gas pipelines to government and  transportation systems.

They hide malware in advance, to cause the maximum physical, and logical harm to citizens, communities, and industry, through wholesale theft and coordinated economic attacks. The weakness of data privacy at the machine level of the binary computer allows



China and others to steal American innovations, plus valuable personal and irreplaceable corporate data. Their cyber onslaught is not limited to pre-positioning malware hidden in resident software ready for future conflict; they and the rest of the world actively attack the U.S. economy as a whole-of-government campaign.

Enemies reach inside U.S. borders to silence, coerce, and threaten citizens and residents. Like it or not, war is raging in cyberspace, not just with China but even with friends looking for some unfair competitive advantage. It is happening right across the world, while the only response that preserves a nation’s hard-won free society was demonstrated decades ago and could have been adopted by the microprocessor industry. The natural ability of the Church-Turing Thesis was implemented to solve the problems of networked computer science by the telecommunication industry.

The full story can be found in my latest book, "The Fate of AI Society." 

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