Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

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> Biological lifeforms would to ensure the survival of their DNA.

Humans are already a hybrid organism that works to ensure survival not only of genes but of culture and knowledge. It's not difficult to imagine a machine civilization would do the same: not only preserve their construction patterns but also their intellectual achievements.

However, none of that is strictly necessary - because evolutionary pressure still applies to machine species in the same way as it applies to us. Machines that stay at home and don't propagate, well, won't propagate. Eventually someone comes along who does propagate and the stagnant species will fade away. There isn't really any difference in mechanism between what we consider biological lifeforms compared to machine ones.

Edit @jimmytucson: HN doesn't let me respond directly, so I'm clarifying my answer here:

> And I can’t see any reason why it would, tbh

It doesn't technically need a reason. The fact that those machines who do replicate eventually dominate the landscape is enough, on its own. If 100 billion machine civilizations choose not to procreate but one does - that's the one that eventually seeds the ecosystem.

Mostly agreed!

> There isn't really any difference in mechanism between what we consider biological lifeforms compared to machine ones.

There is one important difference: we can make machines with vastly better error correction for their replication. That has large impacts on any 'machine evolution'.

Your argument still applies. But there might not be any noticeable change in the machines long after the stars burn out.

Especially if initially they are engineered to have a long generation time. And if you take into account that most mutations are bad for fitness.

> we can make machines with vastly better error correction for their replication

Absolutely, I think we agree on that. It's fun to think about whether machines with some intentionally elevated drift rate may occasionally outperform locked-down ones, but I doubt it would be worth it since I don't see a random walk algorithm like evolution beating intentional design strategies implemented by extreme intellects. (Especially since they'd be able to simulate designs beforehand and could easily consider vast numbers of variations in advance...)

My thoughts on this were spurred by a horror scenario around the Fermi Paradox:

Naively, one might suggest frequent AI uprisings as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. But on closer inspection this falls apart: even if the AIs take over, there's no reason to believe that they would be any less expansionist than what came before. So an AI uprising wouldn't make us see any fewer alien civilisations.

However, suppose we accidentally created grey goo and it eats the planet. The grey good might have low enough mutation rates, that if it hasn't been created with advanced capabilities in the first place, it will never venture out to the stars. It will just stay on the planet, unchanging until the stars burn out.

I was about to make a grey goo analogy, but then I read your second paragraph :)

Those are my thoughts as well: for the purpose of the Fermi Paradox, it doesn't really matter whether it's machines or not - it doesn't even matter if they're "conscious", they could be the equivalent of bacteria colonizing everything.

I think you nailed it on the head when you said their drift rate largely determines their future. I consider beings with (for lack of a better term) high general intelligence to be innately high drift organisms, whether their actual replication processes are locked down or not. The drift they experience will be guided by volition.

Whereas machine bacteria (which we are) would be subject to traditional evolutionary processes. I'm really uncertain about the prospects of locking down the latter with high error correction, because it takes only one such bacterium with a random mutation to escape the error correction mechanism and voilá we're off to the races.

It's worth noting that organisms on Earth have a high variability when it comes to their mutation rate, which suggests the mutation rate itself is a parameter guided by a fitness function rather than an inherent byproduct of our specific biological substrate. Of course I agree with your intuition that much higher error correction rates can probably be achieved in architectures other than DNA/RNA.

In the end this is mostly a meditation on how static life in the universe will end up being. Not just regarding the time frames but also the depth of change. On balance, I suspect we'll end up with a highly variable ecosystem just by virtue of more pathways leading to that future.

I still don’t see why a computer program necessarily self-replicates. You can program it to do so, like a computer virus, but a supremely intelligent one could override its programming.

That is my source for concern, because any such program would have to find self-replication to be some universal “good”, and not just a property of certain dynamical systems like viruses, bacteria, and eukaryotes. And I can’t see any reason why it would, tbh.

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