2019 by BRAM E. GIEBEN (AKA TEXTURE)

Chapter 4 - PANDORA

Source: www.zeronanofuture.blogspot.com
Dated: June 17, 2019
Format: Unexpurgated written transcript

Memetic scientist Susan Blackmore asserted in the early twenty-first century that mankind was Earth’s ‘Pandoran species’ – by unleashing a second, memetic replicator into Earth’s socio-biology, she claimed we had ushered in a new phase in evolution. This was specifically the evolution of ideas and culture, in the form of memes.

The tenets of Universal Darwinism state that if a process is subject to variation, selection and heredity, then evolution not only should, but implicitly must occur. Evolution, as Blackmore’s sometime-colleague Daniel C. Dennett defined it, is: ‘Design without the aid of mind.’

If we consider the potential of nanotechnological devices, guided by Artificial Intelligences vastly more powerful than our own limited biological processors – our brains – to become a third replicator, we must view the emergent technology not solely as a product of human endeavour, nor even as a way-station in evolving memetics. With the proliferation and variation extant in AI systems, from the point of view of the AIs themselves, we have something that looks a lot like chaos: competing systems that although originating in ‘mind-aided’ designs, have now evolved far beyond our ability to measure them. Even the simplest nanotech AIs, the giant brains of Deep Six and ERISKU, have self-designed components and processes that are nigh-on incomprehensible to the human mind, using the phenomena of quantum entanglement and parallel processing in ways that the minds of their human designers could not have envisioned.

In a few short years of self-guided development, these emergent silicon brains have indeed evolved, using the machinery of nano-scale components to ‘think’ upwards of a million times faster than human brains. Yet to think of them as ‘brains,’ or worse, ‘minds,’ is to anthropomorphise them. In effect, they are already a new species: they swim in a hyper-accelerated memetic pool which we can no longer meaningfully share with them. Beyond the biological drive to replicate DNA-based structures, their evolution is post-gene and arguably post-meme. And yet, we can say they are still subject to an ongoing evolutionary process - each new generation of AI computers inherits the characteristics of the previous, therefore heredity is at work.

As I have mentioned, the individual AIs run by LeSanto Corporation, Utopia Atomtech and other nanotech firms are just part of the story: Agora Systems’ Agorachron Matrix is a virtual marketplace, where parallel units process multiple speculative data strands for each given task, using virtual economies in competition with each other to extrapolate trends and produce composite responses. Many other AI-clusters have redundancy built-in, so that each possible outcome is backed up with a multitude of failsafes. Data from these corporate-owned AIs is then compared, contrasted and evaluated by each nano-enabled country’s government-owned AIs – therefore the AI system is subject to Darwinian selection, as well as heredity.

Can there be any doubt that the evolution of AIs is no longer subject to human guidance and control? We are its puppets, not its engineers: the instant, exponential advances of molecular computers’ generational drift have skyrocketed the AIs into a higher realm of evolution than humanity can attain. Together, molecular machines and AI computers constitute a third strand to evolution – a third replicator.

Many would argue that this does not constitute a cause for concern. AIs have human-programmed directives and failsafe parameters which are difficult (or so we believe) to override. As the forefather of nanotech futurists, K. Eric Drexler, warned: “We must not let a single replicating assembler of the wrong kind be loosed on an unprepared world.” AIs are programmed to use Drexler’s ‘sealed assembler lab’ models, which prevent the premature release of replicating assemblers dangerous to the biosphere or its inhabitants. So what could possibly go wrong?

As much as we may fear being supplanted by the still-nascent AIs and their nano-assemblers, already accelerating away from us on their own evolutionary curve, the greatest danger still remains our own folly and naivete. Nanotech is a frontier industry, and those firms ambitious enough to work around safeguards and reprogram cautious AIs to ignore clear and present dangers are still human directed enterprises.

It is the corporate giants, not the AIs or the nanobots, who should trouble our sleep. Without safe testing, the potential to generate dangerous assemblers which could consign the world to irreversible ecophagy is still in the hands of human beings.

Let us hope that Earth’s Pandoran species can keep a lid on unsafe assemblers – lest we suffer the same fate as Pandora herself.



- Professor John Romney, NYC, 2019