We do not yet know what a computer can't do. Indeed, for nearly one hundred years, the computer has been defined capaciously, as a machine that can do the work of any other machine provided it can be defined logically (Alan Turing). Adopting François Laruelle's parlance, Turing's definition could be renamed the Principle of Sufficient Computation; the definition ensures that the computer can actuate any and all events, provided they are formulated as ideas.
The Principle of Sufficient Computation thus reveals a series of characteristics common in computing:
(1) The centrality of action or practice, understood as a series of commands that may be executed in order to alter the states of a system.
(2) The linking of idea to action, wherein if something can be thought it can be executed, and if something has been executed it was, perforce, previously thought.
(3) Practical omniscience, where knowledge swells to the very limits of knowability, even as those limits have been incontrovertibly demonstrated using logical proof.
(4) A system of judgment based not in morality or politics but in mimesis. Computers thus parrot the old question from the Poetics of Aristotle: Is this copy a well-crafted copy?
So we do not yet know what a computer can't do, mostly because the computer has been doing so much for so long.
And, still, indicators show a variety of alternatives, varieties of computation that reside not so much before or after mainstream computing, but along side it. The varieties of computation would include digital computing (the paradigmatic implementation of the Principle of Sufficient Computation), analog computing (formerly dominant, but today largely overshadowed), dialectical computing (unimaginable using today's chips and software), and non-standard or artificial computing.
Artificial computation was discovered by Laruelle, even as artificial computers have not yet been invented, similar to the discovery of Shor's algorithm prior to any machine capable of implementing it. Synonyms for artificial computation include: non-computation, non-standard computation, compu-fiction, and computer fiction.
Artificial computation is defined, axiomatically, as the withdrawal from the Principle of Sufficient Computation, and hence in terms of:
(1) The preemption of all commands and the neutering of the executable, in favor of pure process as a phenomenon immanent to itself.
(2) The delinking of idea and action as to be absolutely un-exchangeable with each other.
(3) Knowledge as radically finite, existing not as the total aggregation of ever-widening claims about the world, but as a series of axioms in the generic real.
(4) A non-Aristotelian technology of immanence, where technology is not understood in terms of craft or mimesis (whether effective or defective).
Artificial computation is thus not post-computational, but rather, somehow, along side it, as a science "liberated from...the neurosciences or cybernetics" (Laruelle). In this sense artificial computation enacts a generic form of thinking, which, ironically, has thus far remained unthinkable by that overweening discipline of philosophy.
Perfection, optimization, and absolution are all terms that originate in moral and metaphysical discourse. Something may realize itself, it may be guided or adjusted, and it will eventually unloosen and dissolve. Perfection refers to something having been fully accomplished, to something in a state of completion. From a Latin root verb meaning “to make,” perfection entails a process of production. To perfect something is to intervene positively in its development, to push it in a particular direction, to craft it and finish it and make it shine. Perfection connotes maturity, development, flawlessness, purity, completion. In this sense, perfection will always have a target in its sights, the target of the ideal form. The perfect soul, or the perfect body, or the perfect society—all these things must be built and polished and pushed toward whatever ideal has been determined (the ideal soul, the ideal body, the ideal society). A metaphysical logic is particularly legible here; the developmental goal or end is the thing that most characterizes perfection, over and above the particular quality of the goal.
Does disorder have a politics? I suspect it must. It has a history, to be sure. Disorder is quite old, in fact, primeval even, the very precondition for the primeval, evident around the world in ancient notions of chaos, strife, or cosmic confusion. But does disorder have a politics as well? As an organizing principle, disorder achieved a certain coherence during the 1990s. In those years technology evangelists penned books with titles like Out of Control (the machines are in a state of disorder, but we like it), and The Cathedral and the Bazaar (disorderly souk good, well-ordered Canterbury bad). The avant argument in those years focused on a radical deregulation of all things, a kind of full-stack libertarianism in which machines and organisms could, and should, self-organize without recourse to rule or law. Far from corroding political cohesion, as it did for Thomas Hobbes and any number of other political theorists, disorder began to be understood in a more positive sense, as the essential precondition for a liberated politics. Or as the late David Golumbia writes in Cyberlibertarianism, the computer society of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries culminated in “the view that ‘centralized authority’ and ‘bureaucracy’ are somehow emblematic of concentrated power, whereas ‘distributed’ and ‘nonhierarchical’ systems oppose that power.” And, further, Golumbia argues that much of the energy for these kinds of political judgements stemmed from a characteristically ring-wing impulse, namely a conservative reaction to the specter of central planning in socialist and communist societies and the concomitant endorsement of deregulation and the neutering of state power more generally. Isaiah Berlin’s notion of negative liberty had eclipsed all other conceptions of freedom; many prominent authors and technologists seemed to agree that positive liberty was only ever a path to destruction. Or as Friedrich Hayek put it already in 1944, any form of positive, conscious imposition of order would inevitably follow “the road to serfdom.” Liberty would thus thrive not from rational order, but from a carefully tended form of disorder.