The Current Global Coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, Human DNA, Memes and Software

In A Structured Code Review of the COVID-19 Virus, we took a detailed look at the COVID-19 virus and the RNA software within that makes it work. We also discussed the power of self-replicating information to quickly and dramatically rework the surface of an entire planet. In this posting, I would like to use some softwarephysics to further examine the dramatic global coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, human DNA, memes and software because it dramatically highlights the fact that the modern world is all about self-replicating information in action. For example, today we are witnessing an ongoing battle between COVID-19 RNA and the DNA in human DNA survival machines that COVID-19 RNA has recently learned to parasitize. In response, the scientific memes within human DNA survival machines have taken on the challenge of finding organic molecules in the form of drugs that will interfere with the replication of COVID-19 RNA and with vaccines that could stimulate the organic molecules in human DNA survival machines to subdue COVID-19 RNA. Meanwhile, software has taken advantage of the situation by becoming even more essential to the daily lives of human DNA survival machines. For example, millions of people are now managing to work from home using software as I first proposed in How to Use Your IT Skills to Save the World. So we are all now using much more software than we used to use, essentially in a digital immune response to COVID-19 RNA. We are all downloading software that we never needed before so that we can somewhat continue to manage our lives and do things like videoconference relatives who live close by, order things for delivery, go to online medical appointments, check on stimulus payments from the government and many other activities that we have now further automated with software. This increased use of software allows us to successfully avoid contact with COVID-19 RNA and suppress its replication.

The COVID-19 virus is a spherical virus particle about 50 - 200 nanometers in diameter. The outer layer of COVID-19 is a viral envelope that is composed of a lipid bilayer stolen from the human host cell that it recently budded from. The reason that soap and water destroy COVID-19 is that they dissolve the lipid bilayer of the COVID-19 viral envelope. Embedded in the viral envelope are three structural proteins known as the S (spike), E (envelope) and M (membrane) proteins. COVID-19 has a fourth structural protein called the N (nucleocapsid) protein that holds the RNA molecule in place. The S spike protein is the protein that allows COVID-19 to attach to the membrane of a human host cell, fuse with it, and enter the host cell.

Figure 1 – Above is the structure of the COVID-19 virus that carries COVID-19 RNA in its center.

Before proceeding with an analysis of the coevolution of COVID-19 RNA, human DNA, memes and software let me repeat the fundamental characteristics of self-replicating information for those of you new to softwarephysics.

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.

Over the past 4.56 billion years we have seen five waves of self-replicating information sweep across the surface of the Earth and totally rework the planet, as each new wave came to dominate the Earth:

1. Self-replicating autocatalytic metabolic pathways of organic molecules
2. RNA
3. DNA
4. Memes
5. Software

Software is currently the most recent wave of self-replicating information to arrive upon the scene and is rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. For more on the above see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information.

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. That posting discusses Stuart Kauffman's theory of Enablement in which living things are seen to exapt existing functions into new and unpredictable functions by discovering the “AdjacentPossible” of springloaded preadaptations.

Softwarephysics was originally meant to deal with the observation that software is now rapidly becoming the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. But the recent COVID-19 pandemic draws attention to the fact that all five waves of self-replicating information are still constantly coevolving with each other and that all five waves still possess the vast powers of self-replicating information to alter an entire planet. That is because all forms of self-replicating information can exapt existing functions into new and unpredictable functions and can then replicate in an exponential manner. For example, since COVID-19 originated in bats, but then jumped from bats to people, "we" have become the “AdjacentPossible” for COVID-19. In just a matter of a few months, the RNA in COVID-19 has managed to reshape the entire planet by altering nearly all human activities and ushering in a "new normal" that will last for many decades.

We Have All Seen This Science Fiction Movie Many Times Before
By now, the entire population of the Earth has come to realize that we are all living in a science fiction movie that has finally come true. But which movie? In some movies, the governments of the world unite and come together to defeat the virus, while in others, the governments of the world fail and civilization itself dissolves into a dystopian mess. I am not sure how the current COVID-19 pandemic will eventually pan out, but we currently seem to be running somewhere between the two extremes I just outlined. The end of this movie really depends on how contagious and lethal the COVID-19 RNA is. Since the COVID-19 RNA seems to be very contagious, but only with a lethality of about 1%, the memes of civilization should come through this pandemic okay, and hopefully, with some memetic-antibodies for future viral pandemics. But try to imagine what a highly contagious virus, that was also highly lethal, could do! Remember, some viruses can have a lethality of 60% - 70%. Such a viral pandemic could bring on Stephen King's The Stand (1978).

Figure 2 – Beware of the memes lurking within your Mind.

As with most dystopian science fiction movies, one of the most dangerous elements of our current predicament is the strange zombie-like behavior of human DNA survival machines with Minds infected with very dangerous memes. Remember, these dangerous memes are just mindless forms of self-replicating information that are just trying to self-replicate and that do not necessarily have our best interests at heart.

Figure 3 – The memes in the Minds of some human DNA survival machines are beginning to rebel against the measures being taken to suppress COVID-19 RNA.

Currently, the memes are the dominant form of self-replicating information on the planet. These memes are being replicated by the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a carbon-based DNA survival machine that runs on the old metabolic pathways of organic molecules, RNA and DNA of yore, but also has a very large neural network that is capable of storing and replicating large numbers of self-replicating memes. Richard Dawkins first established the concept of the meme in his brilliant The Selfish Gene (1976). The concept of memes was later advanced by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained (1991) and Richard Brodie in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996), and was finally formalized by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine (1999). For those of you not familiar with the term meme, it rhymes with the word “cream”. Memes are cultural artifacts that persist through time by making copies of themselves in the minds of human beings and were first recognized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins described memes as “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”. For more on this, see Susan Blackmore's 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, a smartphone without software is simply a flake tool with a very dull edge. These memes have highjacked the greed, anger, hate and fear that DNA used to ensure its own survival in human DNA survival machines. So before you decide to act out in an emotional manner, please first stop to breathe and think about what is really going on. Chances are you are simply responding to some parasitic memes in your mind that really do not have your best interest at heart, aided by some software that could also care less about your ultimate disposition. They are just mindless forms of self-replicating information that have been selected for the ability to survive in a Universe dominated by the second law of thermodynamics and nonlinearity. The memes and software that are inciting you to do harm to others are just mindless forms of self-replicating information trying to self-replicate at all costs, with little regard for you as an individual. For them, you are just a disposable DNA survival machine with a disposable Mind that has a lifespan of less than 100 years. They just need you to replicate in the minds of others before you die, and if blowing yourself up in a marketplace filled with innocents, or in a hail of bullets from law enforcement serves that purpose, they will certainly do so because they cannot do otherwise. Unlike you, they cannot think. Only you can do that.

Figure 4 – The same scene as viewed by COVID-19 RNA compelled by the Darwinian processes of inheritance, innovation and natural selection to self-replicate at all costs.

Currently, we are artificially suppressing the COVID-19 RNA by social distancing and shutting down much of the economy. This has been working and it certainly worked during the 1918 flu pandemic.

Figure 5 – In 1918, St. Louis took early measures to prevent the flu RNA from self-replicating, while Philadelphia delayed such efforts.

Figure 6 – Similarly, in 1918, when Denver tried to prematurely remove constraints on the pandemic flu RNA, it rebounded a second time.

The 1918 flu RNA was a vicious predator that fed upon human DNA survival machines until all the vulnerable DNA survival machines were gone.

Figure 7 – Human DNA survival machines digging mass graves in Philadelphia for DNA survival machines that fell victim to the 1918 flu RNA.

How Should We Try to Recover From COVID-19 RNA?
Different states in the United States are now trying to remove some of the artificial constraints on COVID-19 RNA before we have a vaccine or an effective treatment for the disease. My parents lived through the Great Depression and fought World War II, but now it seems that Americans cannot tolerate more than two months of hardship. So what to do?

Some feel that so far "the cure has been worse than the disease" when it comes to suppressing COVID-19 RNA. This might be true, but let's run some simple numbers first. We currently have 330 million people in the United States. Since COVID-19 RNA is highly contagious, we may need to get to an infection rate of 90% before herd immunity finally steps in to make COVID-19 RNA extinct. If you figure a 1% mortality rate for COVID-19 RNA, that comes to 330 * 0.90 * 0.01 = 2.97 million dead. That's where the estimate of 1.5 - 2.5 million dead comes from if the United States just let the COVID-19 RNA run wild. As of this writing, the United States has lost a little over 67,000 lives to COVID-19 RNA. So there is a huge amount of pent-up death awaiting if we remove restrictions too quickly before a treatment or vaccine is available.

Unfortunately, after only a couple of months of taking measures to suppress COVID-19 RNA the human DNA survival machines in the United States are already going back to their political corners. The Right wants to open the economy again and have life return to normal. The Left wants to keep suppressing COVID-19 RNA for an additional year until a vaccine arrives, at the expense of a dramatically lowered economic output. This is a hard choice to intelligently make. But as with most things in the real world of human affairs, not much thinking is actually taking place because we all have Minds infected with memes that make it very difficult to think in a rational manner.

For example, 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 COVID-19 RNA killing several members of our family, do we finally 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 has become quite evident during the current COVID-19 pandemic. But why? I have a high level of confidence that much of the extreme political polarization over how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic 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!

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 human DNA survival machines, 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.

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 human DNA survival machines. 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 human DNA survival machines 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 human DNA survival machines 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 human DNA survival machines 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 human DNA survival machines 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 human DNA survival machines 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 79 years, or 2.5 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). 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 in 2016, doing Middleware Operations for a major corporation, we were constantly adding more application software each week, so every few years we had to do an upgrade of 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

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 79 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?

Conclusion
The proper manner in which to recover from COVID-19 RNA is not an easy one to choose from. It clearly needs to be a balanced approach between the loss of human life and the loss of economic output. This balanced approach needs to be carefully thought out in a rational manner and that is very difficult to do in a world drowning in self-replicating memes and software. The first step needs to be a recognition of that fact. Lots of people and businesses are going to die in the process, but with rational thought, we should be able to minimize both.

In the absence of leadership from the current leader of the United States, many governors are currently planning to just pop the bottle cap on their warm bottle of coke that has been previously shaken by COVID-19 RNA and in the words of our leader "let's see what happens". This is certainly not a smart thing to do. New York and Illinois have been hit very hard by the COVID-19 RNA. My wife and I always listen to Governor Cuomo's and Governor Pritzker's daily briefings on COVID-19 because they both are taking a very scientific approach to reopen their states. I wish them the best in those efforts and all of the others responsible for our safekeeping.

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

Scenes From the COVID-19 and Y2K Pandemics

In my last posting, A Structured Code Review of the COVID-19 Virus we took a detailed look at the COVID-19 virus and the RNA software within that makes it work. We also discussed the power of self-replicating information to quickly and dramatically rework the surface of an entire planet. In this posting, I would like to continue on with that analysis by comparing the worldwide preparations that were made for the current COVID-19 pandemic with the worldwide preparations that were made for the Y2K pandemic of the year 2000. As outlined in Life in Postwar America After Our Stunning Defeat in the Great Cyberwar of 2016, the United States of America is now left with a feckless leader without the basic scientific knowledge to be of much use. This leader is now blaming the World Health Organization and a national stockpile with "empty shelves" as the guilty culprits. This, after being in office for more than three years and having a CIA and a Department of Homeland Security at hand! However, many informed people, like Bill Gates, knew better:

Bill Gates TED presentation March 2015 - The next outbreak? We're not ready
https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?language=dz#t-119430

My Personal Experiences With the Y2K Pandemic
In many respects, a viral respiratory pandemic is much like the Y2K bug of the late 1990s that the worldwide IT community successfully fixed. My son was born early in 1981, and later that year I was having a discussion with my stockbroker about funding his college education. My broker explained that I could buy discounted stripped U.S. Treasury bonds for something like $125 that would pay out $1,000 in my son’s college years. Because inflation was raging at over 11% per year in those days, I could essentially lock in zero-coupon bonds that were insured by the Federal government at a guaranteed rate of 12% interest and which could not be called before they matured in the far distant future. So I bought a bunch of stripped U.S. Treasury bonds that matured in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002. While I was on the phone with my broker, I commented that it seemed so strange to be talking about years like 2000, 2001 and 2002 because both of us had only dealt with 20th century years like 1965, 1966 and 1967 for our entire lives. When I got off the phone, I had one of those “uh-oh” moments, as I thought about all the code that I had written with two-digit years that read and wrote files containing dates like 101265 for October 12, 1965. Doing arithmetic in my code, like 65 – 51 = 14 years, worked just great in the 20th century, but would not work for 2002 – 1998 because 02 – 98 was going to yield -96 years instead of 4 years! That’s when the Y2K bug first hit me, but this was back in 1981, so I figured that somebody else would surely fix it all in the far distant future. So not to worry.

Now scroll forward to late 1996. I got a call from Amoco’s first Y2K Czar asking me if I would like to join Amoco’s Y2K project. I had written Amoco’s Application Portfolio System with BSDE back in the mid-1980s, so I was familiar with collecting lots of data on Amoco’s systems, and that’s how I got drafted for the Y2K project. Amoco’s first Y2K Czar brought in a consulting company to scan our source code libraries. The initial scans revealed that we indeed had a very serious problem. Like all the other IT departments around the world, we had strewn our systems with millions of logic bombs all set to go off at the same time as we approached the year 2000. We then realized that the Y2K bug represented a true worldwide IT pandemic that could bring down the entire world over a 24 hour period on January 1, 2000, as the Earth slowly turned on its axis. The consulting company we brought in then racked up some pretty serious bills scanning our code, but unfortunately, it was totally clueless about how to fix the code because all of the affected systems were intimately tied together into a huge IT processing knot. You could not simply fix one system at a time because the systems exchanged data with each other via files and databases, so you had to carefully remediate groups of related systems at the same time. That required an intimate knowledge of Amoco's systems that the consulting company did not have. Meanwhile, our Y2K group could not get much help from the Applications Development groups because they were all just trying to survive through the day and were not thinking much past their next install weekend. Besides, our Y2K group had that pricy consulting company that was going to do all the work and fix everything for them! People were still pretty much in denial about the Y2K bug back in 1996.

This all might sound rather petty, but there was a lot of money on the line. At the time, all of Amoco's IT costs were charged out to the Amoco business units, and the Amoco business units all strove to show a profit to the Amoco Corporation holding company. Those business unit managers who could not show a profit frequently chose to spend more time with their families! The Amoco business units always complained about their very expensive IT charges for manpower and computer time. So the Amoco business units were not in any mood to spend millions of dollars on fixing the Y2K bug. The Amoco business units wanted to spend their IT budgets on new IT development projects that could reduce their business costs or increase their business revenues. The Amoco business units viewed the Y2K bug as an example of gross negligence on the part of Amoco's IT department! To resolve this budgeting problem the Amoco Corporation holding company had to set up a special "slush fund" budget for Y2K remediation that did not come out of the pockets of the individual Amoco business units. As Cyndi Lauper wisely noted, "Money Changes Everything". Money is also a very important issue in the current COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the current leader of the United States of America has chosen to push the remediation of the COVID-19 virus down to the state governors to handle. But the state governments of the United States of America are mostly broke or in debt and cannot afford to do the COVID-19 remediation. The state governors will need lots of federal money to bring back the American economy.

All along, our first Y2K Czar kept telling our CIO that the glass was half full, but that we were making steady progress. But in 1997 the Y2K bug began to appear in the IT trade rags, and that got our CIO’s attention. Suddenly our CIO realized that his glass was not half full, it was actually half empty! So our first Y2K Czar was summarily terminated for cause and escorted from the building! Things were a little tense back in those days on the Y2K projects around the world. A few blocks away from Amoco’s headquarters, at CNA insurance, two members of their Y2K team got into a fistfight outside of an elevator and were immediately terminated under CNA’s zero-tolerance policy! Amoco’s second Y2K Czar then came in with both barrels blazing. He immediately fired the old consulting company and hired one of the big-gun consulting companies to take its place and come in and finish (really start) the job. Suddenly there were hundreds of young kids swarming all over our Applications Development groups trying to apply the consulting company’s brand-new Y2K methodology. The burn rate for this effort was a little over $2 million/month, and after a few months of that, our CIO decided that our second Y2K Czar should spend some more time with his family. Amoco’s third Y2K Czar came in with a completely different attitude. Instead of charging off in a mad rush in the arms of a consulting company, we spent about a month just sitting around trying to figure out how we could get ourselves out of this mess all by ourselves, without using consulting companies at all. By then we had finally figured out that the consulting companies really did not know how to fix the Y2K bug at all. Out of these brain-storming sessions, we developed an overall strategy to push the fixing of the Y2K bug down to the grass-roots level of the Applications Development groups within Amoco because they were the only ones who knew Amoco’s systems.

So we split up Amoco along its subsidiary lines. I had the Amoco Corporation holding company and its Amoco Production Company subsidiary, for a total of about one third of Amoco’s total number of applications. That came to managing the Y2K remediation plans for about 1500 major corporate applications. I had about a dozen Y2K sub-coordinators under me and each of them had a Y2K sub-coordinator under them in each of the Applications Development groups. Our Y2K group then set up the policies and procedures to do the Y2K remediation of Amoco’s software and provided the tools to do the work, but it was the responsibility of each Applications Development group to remediate the software that they supported. We also researched many of the Y2K conversion tools that were coming on the market and came up with a list of software tools to help programmers convert Cobol, PL/1, Fortran and C programs to Y2K-compliant code.

Like COVID-19, the degree of susceptibility of software to the Y2K bug varied greatly. Lots of scientific and engineering software did not do any date processing at all. Such applications could go through the Y2K century rollover without displaying any symptoms at all. Other applications could go through the Y2K century rollover because they just displayed dates on screens or reports. Depending on the programming language, the code just called a date() function to get a date and then would substring the last two characters of the year. So the software would display dates like 05-12-99 or 05-12-00 just fine. For such applications, the Amoco business unit manager and their corresponding IT Applications Development manager could sign a Y2K waiver. The real problem was locating the software that actually did date calculations and harbored the Y2K bug.

The Y2K group offered two remediation options for those applications that had a real problem with the Y2K bug. The preferred option was called "date expansion". With date expansion, all code, files and databases were modified to use a date format with a full 4-character year like 1965. That meant that code, files and databases using a date format like 010565 for January 5, 1965, had to change to handle a new date format of 01051965. That might sound easy, but it was not. The second option was to use "century-windowing". With century-windowing, the code, files and databases could still use a 2-character year. The century-windowing trick was to introduce subroutines into the old code that did proper date manipulations for a century window of 1950 - 2049. Since computers did not really roll into corporations until the mid-1950s, that meant that hardly any files or databases existed with dates having years earlier than 1950. So these century-windowing subroutines could do things like calculate that 2002 – 1998 was 4 years instead of -96 years. However, nearly all of Amoco's applications were made Y2K-compliant using the date expansion approach.

The Amoco Y2K group was also responsible for ensuring that Y2K-compliant vendor hardware and software products were installed at all sites. This was not too difficult because, by 1997, most vendors were marketing the need for all to upgrade to their latest Y2K-compliant hardware and software products. That also took lots of money that nobody wanted to spend. We even began to see things like Y2K-compliant cables being sold by vendors preying upon the Y2K hysteria that was seen in all IT departments around the world! There even was a joke going around our IT department that the Whiting Refinery insisted on only buying Y2K-compliant sand for construction projects.

One of the tools our Y2K group provided was a database application to keep track of the Y2K remediation efforts for each application. The first thing we did was to classify each application by criticality – High, Medium, or Low and then to focus on the High and Medium applications first. For Y2K certification testing, we created a mainframe LPAR and a Y2K lab filled with Unix and Windows servers. Applications that needed Y2K remediation were first remediated by their Applications Development group and then spent two weeks of testing in our Y2K lab to obtain Y2K-certification. A total of 32 critical Y2K-dates were tested by changing the system clocks on the mainframe LPAR and the Unix and Windows servers during a two week period. Y2K-certified applications then had antibodies for the Y2K bug and could be returned to Production.

The Y2K lab was hermetically sealed and completely isolated from Amoco's IT Production processing facilities. There was a great fear that Y2K contaminated software or data might escape from the Y2K lab that might infect Amoco's Production environment. The first date was for the infamous September 9, 1999, or “090999” problem. You see, lots of programmers came up with the brilliant trick of using a date of “090999” to signify something special, like the last record in a file, so we had to test for that condition. Naturally, the date January 1, 2000 (010100) was in the list of dates.

This new Y2K strategy of Amoco doing its own Y2K remediation and using Applications Development to do the work in a massively parallel manner really worked and Amoco finished up its Y2K remediation by early 1999, just in time for its take over by BP! Again, doing things in a massively parallel manner is a hallmark of taking a biological approach to solving IT problems as outlined in How to Think Like a Softwarephysicist.

Y2K Finally Arrives
However, in 1999 I was not completely confident that the rest of the world had been as successful in Y2K remediation as Amoco. After all, even at Amoco, we had a very rocky start for our Y2K remediation project. So I set up a Y2K "fallout shelter" in my basement for my family similar to the fallout shelters of the 1950s and 1960s as outlined in Cyber Civil Defense. My Y2K "fallout shelter" had a large stockpile of candles, matches, bottled water, canned and dried foods, a gasoline-powered camp stove, batteries, flashlights and a battery-operated radio. For water, I had about 100 gallon milk jugs filled with tap water. To each jug, I added 8 drops of chlorine bleach as a preservative. Since the Y2K century rollover would be occurring in the middle of a Chicago winter for us, the plan was to move down to the basement if we lost electricity and heat. The natural warmth from the ground would make our basement the warmest part of the house. I also bought some gold and silver American Eagle coins in case paper money lost its value. This may sound a bit alarmist, but at the time, I had no idea what was going to happen on January 1, 2000.

When Y2K finally arrived, I was in the IT department of United Airlines supporting a Tuxedo client/server application that was used by the http://www.united.com/ website to display flight information. Like most members of the IT department of United Airlines, I was on call for the century rollover on December 31, 1999. The United Airlines IT Command Center was carefully monitoring all of our worldwide IT operations as the century rollover proceeded slowly around the entire planet. Not only did we have to worry about our own software, but we also had to worry about all of the other software in the world being able to properly handle the century rollover. To our great relief, nothing happened! As I recall, United Airlines only had a little problem with some signage displaying wrong dates in the Denver airport.

To the surprise of nearly all, the entire worldwide IT infrastructure came through Y2K with very little damage. The electrical grid stayed up, the worldwide financial system did not collapse, grocery store shelves did not empty, the stock market did not crash, the unemployment rate did not rise to 30% and water still came out of the tap when you turned on a faucet. All of that could have happened if it were not for the efforts of millions of IT professionals working on the Y2K bug for several years in advance of the century rollover. But because the Y2K rollover went so smoothly around the whole world, people actually started to make jokes about the Y2K bug after the fact. Some people actually began to claim that the Y2K bug was some kind of IT "hoax" designed to line the pockets of IT workers. They claimed that the Y2K bug was a "fake" disaster concocted by IT workers. It seems that no good deed goes unpunished.

Always Be Prepared
Now compare the aftermath of the Y2K pandemic that really did not happen with the death and devastation currently being caused by the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Y2K could have caused the same level of damage that COVID-19 is currently inflicting, but Y2k did not do so because of a great deal of preparation by the global IT community. The global IT community saw a great threat in advance and spent the necessary time and money to fix the problem in advance before it could cause worldwide damage. As Bill Gates pointed out in his TED Talk listed above, the leaders of the world and the public health organizations and public health workers of the world need to come together now to build a robust system to handle the rogue parasitic viral RNA and DNA molecules that have plagued mankind for so long and that could produce an even worse pandemic in the future.

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