from cells to federated organisms to signaling networks to memes – the primary vector of evolutionary development migrates to higher layers of abstraction, with little change to the foundational blocks below.
“Each epoch continues the evolution of information through a paradigm shift to a further level of indirection.” – Kurzweil
Remind me of Susan Blackmore ‘s answer for the EDGE 2009 question : ARTIFICIAL, SELF-REPLICATING MEME MACHINES.
…"from cells to federated organisms to signaling networks to memes"….
"To“temes” (technological-memes)….to “tremes” (tertiary memes).
Printing presses, rail networks, telephones and photocopiers were among early artificial meme machines, but they only carried out one or two of the three steps of the evolutionary algorithm.
Even with the Internet most of the selection is still being done by humans, but this is changing fast. As we old-fashioned, squishy, living meme machines have become overwhelmed with memes we are happily allowing search engines and other software to take over the final process of selection as well. (reminded me of Daniel Suarez and his great talk at the Long Now on his book : Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality )
Have we inadvertently let loose a third replicator that is piggy-backing on human memes? I think we have. The information these machines copy is not human speech or actions; it is digital information competing for space in giant servers and electronic networks, copied by extremely high fidelity electronic processes.
I think that once all three processes of copying, varying and selecting are done by these machines then a new replicator has truly arrived. We might call these level-three replicators “temes” (technological-memes) or “tremes” (tertiary memes).
Whatever we call them, they and their copying machinery are here now. We thought we were creating clever tools for our own benefit, but in fact we were being used by blind and inevitable evolutionary processes as a stepping stone to the next level of evolution.
..When memes coevolved with genes they turned gene machines into meme machines. Temes are now turning us into teme machines….
…So what is the step that will change everything? At the moment temes still need us to build their machines, and to run the power stations, just as genes needed human bodies to copy them and provide their energy. But we humans are fragile, dim, low quality copying machines, and we need a healthy planet with the right climate and the right food to survive. The next step is when the machines we thought we created become self-replicating. This may happen first with nano-technology, or it may evolve from servers and large teme machines being given their own power supplies and the capacity to repair themselves.
Then we would become dispensable. That really would change everything."
=)
Ah yes, the precious power supplies…. Reminds me of the bumper sticker I have on my Thule Rooftop Rocket Carrier:
“DANGER: This area contains robots. Robots have been known to rise up and rebel against their human masters, destroying all in their path. Never gaze upon or covet their power supply… They hate that.”
Susan is quite a forward thinker, bringing coherency and a framework to Dawkins‘ abstract memes. When I co-taught the genetic free speech class with Larry Lessig, we included her book Meme Machine in the curriculum. In that book, she explores the meme-gene parallels to explain the unusual size of the human brain and the origins of consciousness, language, altruism, religion, and online social networks.
As for the timing, Albert-László Barabási argues in Linked:
“While entirely of human design, the Internet now lives a life of its own. It has all the characteristics of a complex evolving system, making it more similar to a cell than a computer chip. Many diverse components, developed separately, contribute to the functioning of a system that is far more than the sum of its parts. Therefore Internet researchers are increasingly morphing from designers into explorers. They are like biologists or ecologists who are faced with an incredibly complex system that, for all practical purposes, exists independently of them.” (pp.149-50.)
“It is impossible to predict when the Internet will become self-aware, but clearly it already lives a life of its own. It grows and evolves at an unparalleled rate while following the same laws that nature uses to spin its own webs. Indeed it shows many similarities to real organisms.” (158).
Of course, humans are not the endpoint of evolution, and now we are inserting ourselves into the evolution of evolvability. Danny Hillis concludes in his book, The Pattern on the Stone:
“We will not engineer an artificial intelligence; rather we will set up the right conditions under which an intelligence can emerge. The greatest achievement of our technology may well be creation of tools that allow us to go beyond engineering – that allow us to create more than we can understand.” (138)
And the nested recapitulation in evo devo, brings us to cosmology… perhaps….
Ah, yes, the stack of turtles casting shadows of doubt over the hedge…
GustavoG: My first reaction too. I don’t fully grok the teme distinction. I don’t believe they were mentioned in her book, and from her TED talk I didn’t get why the origin of a meme matters, be it human, machine, or alien probe… Maybe she thinks AI is a fundamentally different domain.
I just rediscovered a comment I made on these topics (ASIMO post):
Shrek had it all figured out: “Ogres have layers. Onions have layers.” Evolved complex systems have layers.
Evolution builds in layers. Cells were once independent creatures, before they cooperated to form giant colonies – plants and animals. The primary vector for evolutionary improvement migrates to the highest layer of abstraction, subsuming the lower constructs. The human brain is a canonical example. Our great step forward derived from the enlargement of the neocortex, not a better synapse. This allows for some decomposition of design between layers.
But, unfortunately, the interesting area of study is within a high layer in the stack of abstractions – the network layer. Therein lies the inherent inscrutability of subsystems that I blogged about in The Dichotomy of Design & Evolution. Hence the difficulty in reverse engineering the brain (vs. the heart, for example… to mash metaphors =)
With evolutionary algorithm, we understand the process of creation, but not how the resulting system operates. It is a black box defined by its interfaces.
“Evolution did not change the building blocks, only the size of the networks.” Geoffrey West, SFI (flickr discussion)
And then there’s Kurzweil’s forecast for the near future…
“future machines will be human, even if they are not biological. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high-level paradigm shift, the next level of indirection. Most of the intelligence of our civilization will ultimately be nonbiological. By the end of this century, it will be trillions of trillions of times more powerful than human intelligence”
I think this is a nested issue, and the evolution of memes and culture now occurs more rapidly, and powerfully, than traditional biological evolution. But I’m not sure we know how to exert agency in this higher level emergence as nodal members. (blog, and comments)
Meanwhile, HUAR is all over this whole robot uprising thing:
"it is evident a task force had to be formed of members that take being at the top of the food chain seriously. Robots will uprise. HUAR will be there."
This is what I do with paper work and things in my house. Dear God.
Anyway I’m interested to see if this gets deleted. I posted a question in Religion and Spiritualiy in the Yahoo Answers forum and somehow it was hit upon as a violation of conduct. It was non-offensive and worded correctly for purpose, it was about Al. What could this possible sentient intelligence be learning from all that is talked about and philosophized and argued about in that forum. It can gain intelligence and information from all over the internet via the google search engine but there in human debate was the issue of morals. Would it know how to be good from what it was learning there? To learn to be good, to avoid conflict even- this too could be emerging behavior in individual humans but also in a collective human groups, until perhaps (I admit I hope) a whole collective of the species knows how to get along and help each other. I hope we have that long. But we are grouping now , on the internet, everywhere, with out families, Doctors without borders follows, The Red Cross follows, – a map of groups of people who follow the devastion of wars and trys to fix things up a bit might have an interesting emergent pattern. Especially if we could connect it to a brain pattern or an experience with some other meme.
Begs the question: can we evolve friendly AI?
Because I think that’s the fastest path.
Well, circling back to Susan Blackmore, perhaps we’ll have to co-evolve the memes through the training environment:
“My cat gives birth to a litter, purring all the way. It’s very different with humans and our large heads. It was a dangerous step in evolution. 2.5 million years ago, we started imitating each other. Our peculiar big brains are driven by the memes, not our genes. Language, religion and art are all parasites. We have co-evolved, adapted and become symbiotic with these parasites.”
Perhaps it is naive to assume any AI would be friendly "out of the box" . Assembly and training required…
Hi, I’m an admin for a group called TRANSCENDING, and we’d love to have this added to the group!
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