What is fitter than man? Machine. Fit to do anything. Put gas in it and it is fit until it runs out. Replace pieces that worn out. Keep the thing brand new, oil it, it survives. Fit for the job. The machine has everlasting youth, it is mans dream. Man made the machine for eternity. Only the machine keeps going outdated faster than he.
“Man is a tool to make tools.” - I think Henri Bergson. There was vodka involved.
A machine cannot evolve epigentically I don’t think. Having no fluid, cellular parts which function according to chemical laws, an environment couldn’t be a catalyst to change it genetically. In order to change, a machine would require either a human or another machine to work on it. This process of modification is less efficient than the adaptive process of an organism, and would require more steps, therefore creating more liabilities (more can go wrong).
Think about the reproductive steps involved, too. How much more effort is required to manufacture the parts for an inorganic machine, than those required for the ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm of a fetus to develop.
The magnificence of the organism is its malleability, its ability to self assemble and change it’s shape. Think about how proteins fold and tie together to form tissue, and how capsomeres are arranged into geometric constructions.
If there is a synthetic substance that can do this, I am unaware of it. I haven’t been reading my popular science lately.
So? A human needs bacteria and other humans to work on it to reproduce. And a lot of other moving actions from other things. In nature theres no such thing as low maintenance. The resources are there for excessive spending of effort. Humans are machines helping machines to exist in ever better ways already. Evolution is going on as we are typing on these machines, feeding them our things that make them buzz. T
The synthetic substance?
[tab]Behold, MANKIND…
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Fine. Have it your way. Yes I can imagine a type of machine that appropriates materials from its environment to manufacture replicas of itself. But there is a small problem. A machine would be programmed to recognize only a limited number of dangerous scenarios which would cause it to either perform repair work or reproduction. Say rust for example. A sensor goes off and the rusted part is repaired. I know this is a lame example because these machines probably wouldn’t be primarily metal, but you get my point.
Now what happens when the environment changes in a way that poses new, unknown dangers to the machines survival? Will these machines be able to learn? Would a machine be able to recognize the cause of death or malfunction of itself or another machine, if it is not programmed to sense the things that caused it? Say the environment evolves a corrosive material that breaks down some component of the machine, and say the corrosive material is increasing at a faster rate than the machines can repair or reproduce. Would the machine ever be able to learn how to eliminate the corrosive material itself?
Those yoga chicks are hot, btw. I used to have a girlfriend that did that very move right in front of me, naked. I’d be watching TV and she’d plop right down on the floor smack dab in front of me and start doing that. No matter what was on, I couldn’t resist. I’d see that thang moving like that and I’d have to hit it, every time.
read up on particle swarm optimization, z00t
also, those poses are called the cow and the cat, if you might be wondering
Here’s my thing with this machines business, Phoneutria.
Now we know that organisms evolve (change) physically because of chemical errors during gene replication called mutations. These mutations are teleological accidents, meaning they aren’t random in a causal sense (as there is no such thing as randomess in a determinstic universe), but they aren’t planned or designed, either.
So each organism either possesses mutations which help it adapt and increase its fitness level (sexual selectivity included) in its environment, or possesses mutations that are ineffectual and make no difference, or it possesses mutations that decrease its fitness level.
When we say an organism is getting ‘better’, we mean it has undergone mutations which have increased its fitness level in an environment that is also changing.
So if a machine were invented, it would either have to have a logically replicating heritable unit like a gene that would be subject to mutation, or it would need to have the intelligence to be able to manipulate its own physical nature when the environment demanded such for the machines survival.
With the former, you’d basically have something like an organism, and it would mean little to call it a machine anymore. With the latter, you couldn’t just make a machine with a finite set of intelligence programs… it would have to somehow be able to learn, be able to process information which would identify dangerous changes in its environment, and execute the proper actions to modify itself to keep its fitness level.
Now this swarm intelligence you linked me too is interesting, but I fail to see how even if there is autopoiesis happening here, this holistic system of individual parts could attribute any of the kind of intelligence required to be able to sense dangerous changes in the machines environment.
Like the corrosive material example I mentioned… it is analogous to the human’s ability not only to correct itself in combating viruses and bacteria that threaten the body, but also develop ways to combat those things externally.
A machine might be able to sense damage to its own system by this material, but could it understand how the material itself develops, and devise a way to stop it?
How could a machine ever make that leap from ‘system senses corrosive material presence…repair, repair, repair’ to ‘where the fuck is that stuff coming from and how do we stop it.’
The advantage an organism has over this machine is that even if it doesn’t have the intelligence to solve such a problem, through several generations, mutations can occur genetically that make it immune to the problem anyway.
In the machines case, it couldn’t rely on this mutation as an adaptive strategy (because it has no genetic replicators), so it would have to figure out how to stop it if it were to survive. How do you program a machine to go from a turing machine with a set of finite programs to give it instruction, to a novel problem solver with an ability to learn?