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EMERGENT PHENOMENA. "The jumps — saltations, in complexity parlance — appear to be non-linear emergent phenomena, the result of networked interactions that produce self-organization at ever higher levels. From this perspective, Darwinian evolution is a mechanism of a higher universal law, perhaps even a variant on the second law of thermodynamics." https://lnkd.in/ezFxqyc View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGICAL LEAPS. "A growing number of scientists do say that neo-Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain certain jumps in biological complexity: from single-celled to multicellular organisms, from single organisms to entire communities." https://lnkd.in/ezFxqyc View in LinkedIn

GREY ZONE THRESHOLD. "An artificial intelligence could rewrite its code from scratch — it could change the underlying dynamics of optimization. Such an optimization process would wrap around much more strongly than either evolution accumulating adaptations or humans accumulating knowledge. The key implication for our purposes is that AI might make a huge jump in intelligence after reaching some threshold of criticality." https://lnkd.in/dp3ZKye View in LinkedIn

INCREMENTAL TIPPING POINT. "Once sophisticated enough, an AI will be able to engage in what's called "recursive self-improvement." As an AI becomes smarter and more capable, it will subsequently become better at the task of developing its internal cognitive functions. In turn, these modifications will kickstart a cascading series of improvements, each one making the AI smarter at the task of improving itself. It's an advantage that we biological humans simply don't have." https://lnkd.in/dp3ZKye View in LinkedIn

OBFUSCATING CODE. "There are many reasons to protect a program’s implementation details. Commercial entities generally do so in an attempt to preserve the secrecy of algorithms and pro- tocols that are considered to provide a competitive advantage. While crackers and cyber criminals share this goal, they also seek to confound defense systems, postpone their detection and eventual tracing." https://lnkd.in/dHTSZ_H View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this two weekend noodling on the evolution of genetic and cultural complexity. For sure there are ancient creatures that have taken the path of outsourcing and streamlining their capacities, such as viruses, and thus appear deceptively simple. As usual, with nature there is rarely a single answer or a single path, but rather, a bewildering diversity of schemes that keep us forever fascinated with the flickering panoply of biology. View in LinkedIn

"SELF-MODIFYING CODE is used to build worms and viruses." https://lnkd.in/dcT_V2k View in LinkedIn

IS THE INFO TECH REVOLUTION not just an extension of our biological evolution and the increasing global information is a consequence of our genetics? View in LinkedIn

WIDELY USED. "Self-modifying code (SMC), in this paper, broadly refers to any program that loads, generates, or mutates code at runtime. It is widely used in many of the world’s critical software systems to support runtime code generation and optimization, dynamic loading and linking, OS boot loader, just-in-time compilation, binary translation, or dynamic code encryption and obfuscation." https://lnkd.in/dzAS74T View in LinkedIn

FASTER CHANGE. "Cultural evolution is expected to be faster than biological evolution because of its Lamarckian nature, and because cultural information is transmitted through different routes than genetic information." https://lnkd.in/du2rR_7 View in LinkedIn