I was reading the book The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons
There was a quite interesting part about how AIs evolved and it makes the digital world seem almost biological.
Weird ? Scary ?
Well in some ways yes but at the same time I'd like the future to be now. Having the informational highway not at my fingertips but all around me constantly. The boundary's of imagination not from laws, rules or physics. The imagination and information should needs to be free to everyone everywhere.
I we could rid the world of petty power struggles and politics.
Politics are just made by entity's that the people but somewhere on the way they lost sight of what and who they were supposed to help.
We all need wake up and smell the coffee we are one world one people there is no difference between us if we all could see this we could grow bigger and better networks share information, we could evolve to a great global information sphere and the more minds working together towards the same goal, the faster we'll get there. Giving us abilitys to find new and even better things...
"Of course, AIs did not evolve that way. They sort of slipped into existence when we humans were looking the other way. "By the end of the twentieth century, Christian era, this little world had a crude datashpere. Basic planetary telecommunications had evolved into a decentralized swarm system of old silicon-based computers demanding no organization or hierarchy, demanding nothing beyond a common communications protocol. Creation of a distributed-memory hive mind was then inevitable.
"The earliest AIs were dumb as dirt. Or perhaps the better metaphor would be that they were as dumb as early cellular life that was in the dirt. Some of the earliest hypercritters floating in the warm medium of the datasphere--which was also evolving--were 80-byte organisms inserted into a block of RAM in a virtual computer--a computer simulated by a computer. One of the first humans to release such creatures into the datasphere ocean was name Tom Ray and he was not an AI expert or computer programmer or cyberpuke, which they called hackers then--but was a biologist, an insect collect, botanist, and bird-watcher, and someone who had spent years collecting ants in the jungle for a pre-Hegira scientist name E.O. Wilson. . . .The cyberpukes said that evolving and mutating code sequences happened all the time in computers--they were called bugs and screwed-up programs. They said that if his code sequences evolved into something else they would almost certainly be nonfunctional, nonviable, as most mutations are, and would just foul up the operation of the computer software. So Tom Ray created a virtual computer--a simulated computer within his real computer--for his code-sequenced creations. And then he created an actual 80-byte code-sequence creature that could reproduce, die, and evolve in his computer-within-computer.
"The 80-byte copied itself into more 80-bytes. These 80-bytes proto-AI cell-things would have quickly filled their virtual universe, . . . but Tom Ray gave each 80-byte a date tag, gave them age in other words, and programmed in an executioner that he called the Reaper. The Reaper wandered through this virtual universe and harvested old 80-byte critters and nonviable mutants.
"But evolution, as it is wont to do, tried to outstmart the Reaper. A mutant 79-byte creature proved not only to be viable, but soon outbred and outpaced the 80-bytes. The hyperlifes, ancestors to our Core AIs, were just born but already they were optimizing their genomes. Soon a 45-byte organism had evolved and all but eliminated the earlier artificial life-forms. As their creator, Tom Ray found this odd. 45-bytes did not include enough code to allow for reproduction. More than that, the 45s were dying off as the 80s disappeared. He did an autopsy on one of the 45-creatures.
"It turned out that all of the 45-bytes were parasites. They borrowed needed reproductive code from the 80s to copy themselves. The 79s, it turned out, were immune to the 45-parasite. But as the 80s and 45s moved toward extinction in their coevolutionary downward spiral, a mutant of the 45s appeared. It was a 51-byte parasite and it could prey on the vital 79s. And so it went.
"I mention all this, because it is important to understand that from the very first appearance of human-created artificial life and intelligence, such life was parasitic. It was more than parasitic--it was hyperparasitic. Each new mutation led to parasites which could prey on earlier parasites. . . Within standard months of his creation of hyperlife, Tom Ray discovered 22-byte creatures flourishing in his virtual medium...creatures so algorithmically efficient that when challenged by Tom Ray, human programmers could create nothing closer than a 31-byte version.
"By the early twenty-first century, there was a thriving biosphere of artificial life on Old Earth, both in the quickly evolving datasphere and in the macrosphere of human life. Although the breakthroughs of DNA-computing, bubble memories, standing wave-front parallel processing, and hypernetworking were just being explored, human designers had created silicon-based entities of remarkable ingenuity. And they had created them by the billions. Microchips were in everything from chairs to cans of beans on store shelves to groundcars to artificial human body parts. The machines had grown smaller and smaller until the average human home or office was filled with tens of thousands of them. A worker's chair would recognize her as soon as she sat, bring up the file she had been working on in her crude silicon computer, chat with another chip in a coffeemaker to heat up the coffee, enable the telecommunications grid to deal with calls and faxes and crude electronic mail arrivals so that the worker would not be disturbed, interact with the main house or office computer so that the temperature was optimal, and so forth. In their stores, microchips in the cans of beans on the shelves noted their own price and price changes, ordered more of themselves when they were running short, kept track of the consumers' buying habits, and interacted with the store and the other commodities in it. This web of interaction became as complex and busy as the bubble and froth of Old Earth's organic stew in its early oceans.
