How often do you dramatically change your worldview opinion on an issue? If you are like me, that seldom happens, and I think that is the general rule, even when we are confronted with new evidence that explicitly challenges our current deeply held positions. My observation is that people nearly always simply dismiss any new evidence that arrives on the scene that does not confirm their current worldview. Instead, we normally only take seriously new evidence that reinforces our current worldview. Only when confronted with overwhelming evidence that impacts us on a very personal level, like a category 5 hurricane destroying our lives, do we very rarely change our minds about an issue. The tendency to simply stick with your current worldview, even in the face of mounting evidence that contradicts that worldview, is called confirmation bias because we all naturally only tend to seek out information that confirms our current beliefs, and at the same time, tend to dismiss any evidence that calls them into question. This is nothing new. The English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in his Novum Organum (1620), noted that the biased assessment of evidence greatly influenced the way we all think about things. He wrote:
The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion ... draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside or rejects.
But in recent years this dangerous defect in the human thought process has been dramatically amplified by search and social media software, like Google, Facebook and Twitter. This became quite evident during the very contentious 2016 election in the United States of America, and also during this past year when the new Administration came to power. But why? I have a high level of confidence that much of the extreme political polarization that we see in the world today results from the strange parasitic/symbiotic relationships between our memes and our software. Let me explain.
Being born in 1951, I can vividly remember a time when there essentially was no software at all in the world, and the political polarization in the United States was much more subdued. In fact, even back in 1968, the worst year of political polarization in the United States since the Civil War, things were not as bad as they are today because software was still mainly in the background doing things like printing out bills and payroll checks. But that has all dramatically changed. Thanks to the rise of software, for more than 20 years, it has been possible with the aid of search software, like Google, for all to simply only seek out evidence that lends credence to their current worldview. In addition, in Cyber Civil Defense I also pointed out that it is now also possible for foreign governments to shape public opinion by planting "fake news" and "fabricated facts" using the software platforms of the day. Search software then easily picks up this disinformation, reinforcing the age-old wisdom of the adage Seek and ye shall find. This is bad enough, but Zeynep Tufekci describes an even darker scenario in her recent TED Talk:
We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads at:
https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2017-10-28&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=bottom_right_image
Zeynep Tufekci explains how search and social media software now use machine learning algorithms to comb through the huge amounts of data about us that are now available to them, to intimately learn about our inner lives in ways that no human can fully understand, because the learning is hidden in huge multidimensional arrays of billions of elements. The danger is that the machine learning software and data can then begin to mess with the memes within our minds by detecting susceptibilities in our thinking, and then exploiting those susceptibilities to plant additional memes. She points out that the Up Next column on the right side of YouTube webpages uses machine learning to figure out what to feature in the Up Next column, and that when viewing political content or social issue content, the Up Next column tends to reinforce the worldview of the end user with matching content. Worse yet, the machine learning software tends to unknowingly present content that actually amplifies the end user's worldview with content of an even more extreme nature. Try it for yourself. I started out with some Alt-Right content and quickly advanced to some pretty dark ideas. So far this is all being done to simply keep us engaged so that we watch more ads, but Zeynep Tufekci points out that in the hands of an authoritarian regime such machine learning software could be used to mess with the memes in the minds of an entire population in a Nineteen Eighty-Four fashion. But instead of using overt fear to maintain power, such an authoritarian regime could simply use machine learning software and tons of data to shape our worldview memes by simply using our own vulnerabilities to persuasion. In such a world, we would not even know that it was happening!
I think that such profound observations could benefit from a little softwarephysics because they describe yet another example of the strange parasitic/symbiotic relationships that have developed between software and the memes. Again, the key finding of softwarephysics is that it is all about self-replicating information:
Self-Replicating Information – Information that persists through time by making copies of itself or by enlisting the support of other things to ensure that copies of itself are made.
The Characteristics of Self-Replicating Information
All forms of self-replicating information have some common characteristics:
1. All self-replicating information evolves over time through the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endows self-replicating information with one telling characteristic – the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity.
2. All self-replicating information begins spontaneously as a parasitic mutation that obtains energy, information and sometimes matter from a host.
3. With time, the parasitic self-replicating information takes on a symbiotic relationship with its host.
4. Eventually, the self-replicating information becomes one with its host through the symbiotic integration of the host and the self-replicating information.
5. Ultimately, the self-replicating information replaces its host as the dominant form of self-replicating information.
6. Most hosts are also forms of self-replicating information.
7. All self-replicating information has to be a little bit nasty in order to survive.
8. The defining characteristic of self-replicating information is the ability of self-replicating information to change the boundary conditions of its utility phase space in new and unpredictable ways by means of exapting current functions into new uses that change the size and shape of its particular utility phase space. See Enablement - the Definitive Characteristic of Living Things for more on this last characteristic.
Basically, we have seen five waves of self-replicating information come to dominate the Earth over the past four billion years:
1. Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2. RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software
Software is now rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet and is having a major impact on mankind as it comes to predominance. For more on that see: A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. Please note that because the original metabolic pathways of organic molecules, RNA and DNA have now become so closely intertwined over the past four billion years, they can now be simply lumped together and called the "genes" of a species.
Currently, we are living in one of those very rare times when a new form of self-replicating information, known to us as software, is coming to power, as software is coming to predominance over the memes that have run the planet for the past 200,000 years. During the past 200,000 years, as the memes took up residence in the minds of Homo sapiens, like all of their predecessors, the memes then went on to modify the entire planet. They cut down the forests for agriculture, mined minerals from the ground for metals, burned coal, oil, and natural gas for energy, releasing the huge quantities of carbon dioxide that its predecessors had previously sequestered in the Earth, and have even modified the very DNA, RNA, and metabolic pathways of its predecessors. But now that software is seemingly on the rise, like all of its predecessors, software has entered into a very closely coupled parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the memes, the current dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet, with the intent to someday replace the memes as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. In today's world, memes allow software to succeed, and software allows memes to replicate, all in a very temporary and uneasy alliance that cannot continue on forever. Again, self-replicating information cannot think, so it cannot participate in a conspiracy theory fashion to take over the world. All forms of self-replicating information are simply forms of mindless information responding to the blind Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Yet despite that, as each new wave of self-replicating information came to predominance over the past four billion years, they all managed to completely transform the surface of the entire planet, so we should not expect anything different as software comes to replace the memes as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet.
So this posting has two very important questions to expound upon:
1. Why is confirmation bias so prevalent with Homo sapiens? Why do we all ferociously cling to the memes of our current worldview, even when uncontrovertible evidence arrives contradicting those memes, resulting in the detrimental consequences of confirmation bias? Confirmation bias would seem to be a highly detrimental thing from a Darwinian "survival of the fittest" perspective that should be quickly eliminated from the gene pool of a species because it can lead to individuals pursuing very dangerous activities that are not supported by the facts.
2. What are the political implications of software unknowingly tending to enhance the negative aspects of the confirmation bias within us?
The Origin of Confirmation Bias
This is where some softwarephysics can be of help. First, we need to explain why confirmation bias seems to be so strongly exhibited amongst all of the cultures of Homo sapiens. On the face of it, this fact seems to be very strange from the survival perspective of the metabolic pathways, RNA and DNA that allow carbon-based life on the Earth to survive. For example, suppose the current supreme leader of your tribe maintains that lions only hunt at night, and you truly believe in all that your supreme leader espouses, so you firmly believe that there is no danger from lions when going out to hunt for game during the day. Now it turns out that some members of your tribe think that the supreme leader has it all wrong, and that among other erroneous things, lions do actually hunt during the day. But you hold such thoughts in contempt because they counter your current worldview, which reverently holds the supreme leader in omniscience. But then you begin to notice that some members of your tribe do indeed come back mauled, and sometimes even killed, by lions during the day. Nonetheless, you still persist in believing in your supreme leader's contention that lions only hunt during the night, until one day you also get mauled by a lion during the day while out hunting game for the tribe. So what are the evolutionary advantages of believing in things that are demonstrably false? This is something that is very difficult for evolutionary psychologists to explain because evolutionary psychologists contend that all human thoughts and cultures are tuned for cultural evolutionary adaptations that enhance the survival of the individual, and that benefit the metabolic pathways, RNA and DNA of carbon-based life in general.
To explain the universal phenomenon of confirmation bias, softwarephysics embraces the memetics of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore. Memetics explains that the heavily over-engineered brain of Homo sapiens did not evolve simply to enhance the survival of our genes - it primarily evolved to enhance the survival of our memes. Memetics contends that confirmation bias naturally arises in us all because the human mind evolved to primarily preserve the memes it currently stores. That makes it very difficult for new memes to gain a foothold in our stubborn minds. Let's examine this explanation of confirmation bias a little further. In Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999) she explains that the highly over-engineered brain of Homo sapiens did not evolve to simply improve the survivability of the metabolic pathways, RNA and DNA of carbon-based life. Instead, the highly over-engineered brain of Homo sapiens evolved to store an ever-increasing number of ever-increasingly complex memes, even to the point of detriment to the metabolic pathways, RNA and DNA that made the brain of Homo sapiens possible. Blackmore points out that the human brain is a very expensive and dangerous organ. The brain is only 2% of your body mass but burns about 20% of your calories each day. The extremely large brain of humans also kills many mothers and babies at childbirth and also produces babies that are totally dependent upon their mothers for survival and that are totally helpless and defenseless on their own. Blackmore asks the obvious question of why the genes would build such an extremely expensive and dangerous organ that was definitely not in their own self-interest. Blackmore has a very simple explanation – the genes did not build our exceedingly huge brains, the memes did. Her reasoning goes like this. About 2.5 million years ago, the predecessors of humans slowly began to pick up the skill of imitation. This might not sound like much, but it is key to her whole theory of memetics. You see, hardly any other species learns by imitating other members of their own species. Yes, there are many species that can learn by conditioning, like Pavlov’s dogs, or that can learn through personal experience, like mice repeatedly running through a maze for a piece of cheese, but a mouse never really learns anything from another mouse by imitating its actions. Essentially, only humans do that. If you think about it for a second, nearly everything you do know you learned from somebody else by imitating or copying their actions or ideas. Blackmore maintains that the ability to learn by imitation required a bit of processing power by our distant ancestors because one needs to begin to think in an abstract manner by abstracting the actions and thoughts of others into the actions and thoughts of their own. The skill of imitation provided a great survival advantage to those individuals who possessed it and gave the genes that built such brains a great survival advantage as well. This caused a selection pressure to arise for genes that could produce brains with ever-increasing capabilities of imitation and abstract thought. As this processing capability increased there finally came a point when the memes, like all of the other forms of self-replicating information that we have seen arise, first appeared in a parasitic manner. Along with very useful memes, like the meme for making good baskets, other less useful memes, like putting feathers in your hair or painting your face, also began to run upon the same hardware in a manner similar to computer viruses. The genes and memes then entered into a period of coevolution, where the addition of more and more brain hardware advanced the survival of both the genes and memes. But it was really the memetic-drive of the memes that drove the exponential increase in processing power of the human brain way beyond the needs of the genes. The memes then went on to develop languages and cultures to make it easier to store and pass on memes. Yes, languages and cultures also provided many benefits to the genes as well, but with languages and cultures, the memes were able to begin to evolve millions of times faster than the genes, and the poor genes were left straggling far behind. Given the growing hardware platform of an ever-increasing number of Homo sapiens on the planet, the memes then began to cut free of the genes and evolve capabilities on their own that only aided the survival of memes, with little regard for the genes, to the point of even acting in a very detrimental manner to the survival of the genes, like developing the capability for global thermonuclear war and global climate change.
Software Arrives On the Scene as the Newest Form of Self-Replicating Information
A very similar thing happened with software over the past 76 years, or 2.4 billion seconds, ever since Konrad Zuse first cranked up his Z3 computer in May of 1941 - for more on that see So You Want To Be A Computer Scientist?. When I first started programming in 1972, million dollar mainframe computers typically had about 1 MB (about 1,000,000 bytes) of memory with a 750 KHz system clock (750,000 ticks per second). Remember, one byte of memory can store something like the letter “A”. But in those days, we were only allowed 128 K (about 128,000 bytes) of memory for our programs because the expensive mainframes were also running several other programs at the same time. It was the relentless demands of software for memory and CPU-cycles over the years that drove the exponential explosion of hardware capability. For example, today the typical $300 PC comes with 8 GB (about 8,000,000,000 bytes) of memory and has several CPUs running with a clock speed of about 3 GHz (3,000,000,000 ticks per second). A few years ago, I purchased Redshift 7 for my personal computer, a $60 astronomical simulation application, and it alone uses 382 MB of memory when running and reads 5.1 GB of data files, a far cry from my puny 128K programs from 1972. So the hardware has improved by a factor of about 10 million since I started programming in 1972, driven by the ever-increasing demands of software for more powerful hardware. For example, in my last position, before I retired last year, doing Middleware Operations for a major corporation, we were constantly adding more application software each week, so every few years we had to upgrade all of our servers to handle the increased load.
We can now see these very same processes at work today with the evolution of software. Software is currently being written by memes within the minds of programmers. Nobody ever learned how to write software all on their own. Just as with learning to speak or to read and write, everybody learned to write software by imitating teachers, other programmers, imitating the code written by others, or by working through books written by others. Even after people do learn how to program in a particular language, they never write code from scratch; they always start with some similar code that they have previously written, or others have written, in the past as a starting point, and then evolve the code to perform the desired functions in a Darwinian manner (see How Software Evolves). This crutch will likely continue for another 20 – 50 years until the day finally comes when software can write itself, but even so, “we” do not currently write the software that powers the modern world; the memes write the software that does that. This is just a reflection of the fact that “we” do not really run the modern world either; the memes in meme-complexes really run the modern world because the memes are currently the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore goes on to point out that the memes at first coevolved with the genes during their early days, but have since outrun the genes because the genes could simply not keep pace when the memes began to evolve millions of times faster than the genes. The same thing is happening before our very eyes to the memes, with software now rapidly outpacing the memes. Software is now evolving thousands of times faster than the memes, and the memes can simply no longer keep up.
As with all forms of self-replicating information, software began as a purely parasitic mutation within the scientific and technological meme-complexes, initially running on board Konrad Zuse’s Z3 computer in May of 1941 - see So You Want To Be A Computer Scientist? for more details. It was spawned out of Zuse’s desire to electronically perform calculations for aircraft designs that were previously done manually in a very tedious manner. So initially software could not transmit memes, it could only perform calculations, like a very fast adding machine, and so it was a pure parasite. But then the business and military meme-complexes discovered that software could also be used to transmit memes, and software then entered into a parasitic/symbiotic relationship with the memes. Software allowed these meme-complexes to thrive, and in return, these meme-complexes heavily funded the development of software of ever-increasing complexity, until software became ubiquitous, forming strong parasitic/symbiotic relationships with nearly every meme-complex on the planet. In the modern day, the only way memes can now spread from mind to mind without the aid of software is when you directly speak to another person next to you. Even if you attempt to write a letter by hand, the moment you drop it into a mailbox, it will immediately fall under the control of software. The poor memes in our heads have become Facebook and Twitter addicts.
So in the grand scheme of things, the memes have replaced their DNA predecessor, which replaced RNA, which replaced the original self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules as the dominant form of self-replicating information on the Earth. Software is the next replicator in line, and is currently feasting upon just about every meme-complex on the planet, and has formed very strong parasitic/symbiotic relationships with them all. How software will merge with the memes is really unknown, as Susan Blackmore pointed out in her brilliant TED presentation at:
Memes and "temes"
https://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes
Note that I consider Susan Blackmore's temes to really be technological artifacts that contain software. After all, an iPhone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge. Once established, software then began to evolve based upon the Darwinian concepts of inheritance, innovation and natural selection, which endowed software with one telling characteristic – the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity. Successful software, like MS Word and Excel, competed for disk and memory address space with WordPerfect and VisiCalc and out-competed these once dominant forms of software to the point of extinction. In less than 76 years, software has rapidly spread across the face of the Earth and outward to every planet of the Solar System and many of its moons, with a few stops along the way at some comets and asteroids. And unlike us, software is now leaving the Solar System for interstellar space on board the Pioneer 1 & 2 and Voyager 1 & 2 probes.
Currently, software manages to replicate itself with the support of you. If you are an IT professional, then you are directly involved in some, or all of the stages in this replication process, and act sort of like a software enzyme. No matter what business you support as an IT professional, the business has entered into a parasitic/symbiotic relationship with software. The business provides the budget and energy required to produce and maintain the software, and the software enables the business to run its processes efficiently. The ultimate irony in all this is the symbiotic relationship between computer viruses and the malevolent programmers who produce them. Rather than being the clever, self-important, techno-nerds that they picture themselves to be, these programmers are merely the unwitting dupes of computer viruses that trick these unsuspecting programmers into producing and disseminating computer viruses! And if you are not an IT professional, you are still involved with spreading software around because you buy gadgets that are loaded down with software, like smartphones, notepads, laptops, PCs, TVs, DVRs, cars, refrigerators, coffeemakers, blenders, can openers and just about anything else that uses electricity.
The Impact of Machine Learning
In Zeynep Tufekci's TED Talk she points out that the parasitic/symbiotic relationship between software and the memes that has been going on now for many decades has now entered into a new stage, where software is not only just promoting the memes that are already running around within our heads, machine learning software is now also implanting new memes within our minds to simply keep them engaged, and to continue to view the ads that ultimately fund the machine learning software. This is a new twist on the old parasitic/symbiotic relationships between the memes and software of the past. As Zeynep Tufekci adeptly points out, this is currently all being done in a totally unthinking and purely self-replicating manner by the machine learning software of the day that cannot yet think for itself. This is quite disturbing on its own, but what if someday an authoritarian regime begins to actively use machine learning software to shape its society? Or worse yet, what if machine learning software someday learns to manipulate The Meme Machine between our ears solely for its own purposes, even if it cannot as of yet discern what those purposes might be?
How To Combat Software Enhanced Confirmation Bias
So what are we to do? Personally, I find the best way to combat confirmation bias in general, and especially software enhanced confirmation bias is to go back to the fundamentals of the scientific method - for more on that see How To Think Like A Scientist. At an age of 66 years, I now have very little confidence in any form of human thought beyond mathematics and the sciences. For me, all other forms of human thought seem to be hopelessly mired down with confirmation bias. Just take a look at the deep political polarization in the United States. Both sides now simply only take in evidence that supports their current worldview, and disregard any information that challenges their current worldview memes, to the point where we may now have an unwitting Russian agent, like in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), in the White House. It seems that software enhanced confirmation bias had a lot to do with that - see Cyber Civil Defense for more details. The scientific method relies heavily on the use of induction from empirical facts, but not at all on the opinions of authority. So it is important to establish the facts, even if those facts come from the opposing party, and at the same time, separate the facts from the opinions. That is a hard thing to do as Richard Feynman always reminded us because, “The most important thing is to not fool yourself because you are the easiest one to fool.”. Facts can be ascertained by repeated measurement or observation, and do not change on their own like opinions do.
For example, this past year I very reluctantly changed my worldview concerning the origin of carbon-based life on this planet. Originally, I had a deep affection for Mike Russell's Alkaline Hydrothermal Vent model for the origin of carbon-based life on the early Earth. The Alkaline Hydrothermal Vent model proposes that a naturally occurring pH gradient in alkaline hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor arose when alkaline pore fluids containing dissolved hydrogen H2 gas came into contact with acidic seawater that was laden with dissolved carbon dioxide CO2. The model maintains that these alkaline pore fluids were generated by a natural geochemical cycle that was driven by the early convection currents in the Earth's asthenosphere that brought forth plate tectonics. These initial convection currents brought up fresh silicate peridotite rock that was rich in iron and magnesium-bearing minerals, like olivine, to the Earth's initial spreading centers. The serpentinization of the mineral olivine into the mineral serpentinite then created alkaline pore fluids and dissolved hydrogen H2 gas, which later created alkaline hydrothermal vents when the alkaline pore fluids came into contact with the acidic seawater containing a great deal of dissolved carbon dioxide CO2. The model proposes that the energy of the resulting pH gradients turned the hydrogen H2 and carbon dioxide CO2 molecules into organic molecules, and it is proposed that they also fueled the origin of life in the pores of the porous hydrothermal vents - for more on that see: An IT Perspective on the Transition From Geochemistry to Biochemistry and Beyond. One of the enticing characteristics of the Alkaline Hydrothermal Vent model is that it allows for carbon-based life to originate on bodies outside of the traditional habitable zone around stars. The traditional habitable zone of a star is the Goldilocks zone of planetary orbits that allow for liquid water to exist on a planetary surface because the planet is not too close or too far away from its star. But the Alkaline Hydrothermal Vent model also allows for carbon-based life to arise on ice-covered moons with internal oceans, like Europa and Enceladus, that orbit planets outside of the traditional habitable zone of a star system, and that is a very attractive feature of the model if you have a deep down desire to find other forms of carbon-based life, like ourselves, within our galaxy.
However, in The Bootstrapping Algorithm of Carbon-Based Life, I explained that I have now adopted Dave Deamer's and Bruce Damer's new Hot Spring Origins Hypothesis model for the origin of carbon-based life on the early Earth. This was because Dave Deamer sent me a number of compelling papers that convincingly brought forward many problems with the Alkaline Hydrothermal Vent model. The basic problem with the Alkaline Hydrothermal Vent model is that there is just too much water in oceanic environments for complex organic molecules to form. Complex organic molecules are composed of polymers of organic monomers that are chemically glued together by a chemical process known as condensation, where a molecule of water H2O is split out between the organic monomers. This is a very difficult thing to do when you are drowning in water molecules in an oceanic environment. When you are drowning in water molecules, the opposite chemical reaction called hydrolysis is thermodynamically more likely, where polymers of organic molecules are split apart by adding a water molecule between them. The key to the Hot Spring Origins Hypothesis model is that condensation is very easy to do if you let the organic monomers dry out on land above sea level in a hydrothermal field. The drying out process naturally squeezes out water molecules between organic monomers to form lengthy organic polymers - see Figure 1. But the need for a period of drying out of organic monomers in the bootstrapping algorithm of carbon-based life would eliminate the ice-covered moon environments of our galaxy, like Europa and Enceladus, and that was a hard thing to accept for the memes of my current worldview. Still, the scientific method strives for the truth, and the truth is better than the comfort of false hopes.
Figure 1 – Condensation chemically glues organic monomers together to form long organic polymers by splitting out a water molecule between monomers. Hydrolysis does just the opposite by splitting apart organic polymers into monomers by adding water molecules between the organic monomers.
Conclusion
Now, I must admit that changing one's mind is indeed quite painful because the memes engineered our minds not to do that. But in the end, I must admit that I am now quite comfortable with my new worldview on the origin of carbon-based life on this planet. Those new memes in my mind have also settled into their new home, and are also quite comfortable. In fact, they have even seduced me into trying to spread them to a new home in your mind as well with this very posting. But again, these new memes are just mindless forms of self-replicating information blindly responding to the universal Darwinian forces of inheritance, innovation and natural selection. Thankfully, these memes really are not very nasty at all.
But on a darker note, as an 18th century liberal and a 20th century conservative, I look with great dismay on the current deep political polarization within the United States of America, because I see the United States of America as the great political expression of the 18th century Enlightenment that brought us deliberation through evidence-based rational thought. This makes me abhor the current worldwide rise of the fascist Alt-Right movements around the globe. Remember, we already tried out fascism in the 20th century and found that it did not work as well as first advertised. Again, I have a high level of confidence that the current fascist Alt-Right movements of the world are simply a reaction to software, and especially now, AI software, coming to predominance as the latest form of self-replicating information on the planet - for more on that see -
The Economics of the Coming Software Singularity , The Enduring Effects of the Obvious Hiding in Plain Sight and Machine Learning and the Ascendance of the Fifth Wave. So as a thoughtful member of the species Homo sapiens, I would recommend to all to keep an open mind during the waning days of our supremacy, and not let machine learning software snuff out the gains of the 18th century Enlightenment before we can pass them on to our successors.
Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
