Science fiction author Peter Watts has written an interesting blog post about the possibility life emerging spontaneously inside the internet. That's not a new idea; SF authors have been exploring the idea for years (Skynet in The Terminator series, Robert J. Sawyers WWW trilogy are just two examples), but now AI researchers are looking at how it might actually happen.
Now Blaise Agüera y Arcas and his buddies at Google have rubbed our faces in our own lack of vision. Starting with a programming language called (I kid you not) Brainfuck, they built a digital “primordial soup” of random bytes, ran it under various platforms, and, well…read the money shot for yourself, straight from the (non-peer-reviewed) ArXiv preprint “Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction”[1]:
“when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. … increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators.”
Apparently, self-replicators don’t even need random mutation to evolve. The code’s own self-modification is enough to do the trick. Furthermore, while
“…there is no explicit fitness function that drives complexification or self-replicators to arise. Nevertheless, complex dynamics happen due to the implicit competition for scarce resources (space, execution time, and sometimes energy).”
Watts summarizes the research in (relatively) non-technical detail. It's fascinating and more than a little bit scary. After reading the post, do check out his novel, Maelstrom, cited in the post, in which he explored some of the implications 15 years ago.
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