A UNIVERSE OF SELF-REPLICATING CODE
George Dyson [3.26.12]
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What's the driver today? You want one word? It's advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it's the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they're trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.
And we have never seen that. Or I mean, we have seen numbers like that, in epidemics or chain reactions, and there's no question it's a very interesting phenomenon. But still, it's very hard not to just look at it from our point of view. What does it mean to us? What does it mean to my investments? What does it mean to my ability to have all the music I want on my iPhone? That kind of thing. But there's something else going on. We're seeing a fraction of one percent of it, and there's this other 99.99 percent that people just aren't looking at.
The beginning of this was driven by two problems. The problem of nuclear weapons design, and the problem of code breaking were the two drivers of the dawn of this computational universe. There were others, but those were the main ones.
What's the driver today? You want one word? It's advertising. And, you may think advertising is very trivial, and of no real importance, but I think it's the driver. If you look at what most of these codes are doing, they're trying to get the audience, trying to deliver the audience. The money is flowing as advertising.
And it is interesting that Samuel Butler imagined all this in 1863, and then in his book Erewhon. And then 1901, before he died, he wrote a draft for " Erewhon Revisited." In there, he called out advertising, saying that advertising would be the driving force of these machines evolving and taking over the world. Even then at the close of 19th century England, he saw advertising as the way we would grant power to the machines.
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http://edge.org/conversation/a-universe-of-self-replicating-code |
