[ih] Terminator - for real.

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Miles Fidelman

    > an all to[o] plausible scenario for an autonomous drone to become a
    > terminator killing machine ... Be scared.  Be very scared.

I know I'm not supposed to reply to this post on-list (apologies, Joe), but
my reply does have an Internet connection. - which is that the Internet is
_part_ of the next stage of evolution (actually, of a process more basic than
evolution, because 'where did evolution come from' - but let's use
'evolution' as a short-hand for the whole thing, for now), and I think it's
an important point which I haven't heard elsewhere.

I've long felt that nature/evolution has _always_ been on a path of creating
improving information storage/distribution systems. One of the earliest was
DNA. (Speaking of which, "The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life",
by Quammen, is a really good book that covers how that happened [among other
things], as best it is now understood.)

The next step after that was animals complex enough to be able to teach their
young; i.e. an information transmission technique outside of DNA. Humans then
invented language (which I've been reading up on recently, about how
languages of the Indo-European family have out-competed other languags - so
that now, almost all the languages which were extant in Europe in the Bronze
Age have been replaced with Indo-European languages - except Basque).

This was followed by writing (an interesting stage - it seems to have been
independently re-invented - like the eye - 3, or maybe 4 times), then the
printed book (fast, cheap, error-free iformation replication), and then
radio/telgraph - all increasingly efficient information storage/distribution
systems.

Then Babbage invented computers, and shortly after he did that, we (humans)
started hooking them together, so they could exchange information . . . and
here we are.

The interesting question, of course. is what will happen next. Some stages
out-competed earlier stages - like DNA out-competing the 'RNA world', for a
variety of reasons, in part because it was a more robust, error-free
information system (but see cancer). But others have been retained (up until
now, at least).

IPv4 being a crappy design isn't a problem - the vertebrate eye is a
shockingly bad design (the basic architecture means that the first couple of
layers of the information processing hardware have to be transparent), but
evolution made it work. The Internet seems to be making IPv4 work.

Like the RNA world, we have likely created what is likely to be our strongest
competitor. (This was predicted long ago - e.g. the Butlerian Jihad:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#Butlerian_Jihad

of 'Dune', as well as "Darwin among the Machines", by Samuel Butler, from
1863, linked there.)

The Internet has had a role to play in the rise of the thinking machines: in
addition to enabling communication among AI researchers, many LLM's have been
'trained' with information retrieved across the Internet (to the point where
there are now legal battles over the use of databases retrieved across the
Internet for training LLM's). As "Neuromancer" predicts, they'll likely use
it to communicate with each other.

I could expand on many of these points, but that would be even more
off-topic, so I won't. (Feel free to forward this post anywhere.)

Yes, I know I'm insane; I cheerfully admitted that many decades ago! :-)

	Noel