Artificial Life in the Process of Evolution
Whether your taste in Dr. Frankensteins runs to Mary Shelley or Mel Brooks, this is where you’ll find them--breeding, replicating, mutating, evolving and exchanging their recipes for “life.”
The Artificial Life II Conference--co-sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute and the Los Alamos National Laboratory--is a primordial soup of biologists, physicists, computer scientists and anthropologists all struggling not only to evolve new theories of life but to actually create new forms. In the same way that the artificial intelligentsia use computers as their medium and metaphor to model thought, “A Lifers” rely on software and silicon as their virtual DNA to emulate life and evolution.
“ ‘A life’ is an attempt to abstract the principles of life from its material organization and re-create them in other materials,” says Chris Langton, a conference organizer and Los Alamos A Lifer.
A Lifers are less interested in biology than in bio-logic. Where biology is analytical, artificial life is synthetic. The idea is to craft self-organizing systems that explain what life is even as they evolve into new forms of “life.”
As scientific subcultures go, the A Lifers are atypically smart, enthusiastic and inordinately fond of Gary Larson “Far Side” cartoons. They are passionate--even zealous--in their belief that we are destined to share the world with a multitude of evolving artificial life species. No doubt, a synthetic Frank Sinatra will one day be crooning:
That’s (artificial) life
That’s what people say
Riding high in April
Reprogrammed in May
In fact, the artificial life movement already offers a set of powerful insights into the way technology and innovation will evolve. The awesome results of billions of years of biology makes a compelling case to consider evolution as a design strategy for new technologies.
For example, as computers and their software grow ever more complex, our traditional programming methods dissolve into inefficiency. “If you can’t write a program, maybe you can evolve it,” says Danny Hillis, creator of the Connection Machine, a supercomputer that links tens of thousands of microprocessors into a super-sophisticated network. “The dream is to evolve programs that do things we want. We’re not there yet, but there’s reason to believe that we’re just about to be.”
The challenge thus shifts from treating a computer program as something to be engineered to viewing it as something that can be grown. Hillis believes that, increasingly, people will design computer environments that encourage software to “grow” in desired ways. Successful software--the fittest--will be harvested.
Similarly, it only makes sense that biotechnology innovation becomes harnessed to evolutionary dynamics. “Applied molecular evolution is the next stage of biotechnology,” asserts University of Pennsylvania biologist and MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” Fellow Stuart Kauffman, who consults to industry. Kauffman sees new generations of pharmaceuticals that are evolved as much as they are engineered. By designing and accelerating evolutionary forces, industry will be able to more effectively discover the best of billions of possible molecular combinations.
But the burning ambition of these A Lifers isn’t commercial--it’s to spawn new life, to build self-perpetuating, adaptable and intelligent creatures that can survive and prosper in the harsh environs of the The Real World.
“We have to prepare for the inevitable,” asserts UCLA biologist Charles Taylor. “We are all going to be living in a world filled with artificial life forms that we haven’t yet imagined.”
Taylor and most A Lifers point to computer worms and viruses as but the first crude artificial life forms to be propagated in the real world. These little chunks of software can demonstrably spread and replicate, parasitizing little personal computers and giant mainframes. A Life true believers insist that, just as biological life evolved into higher and more sophisticated beings, artificial life will likewise evolve more complex and powerful creatures. The next century, they say, will see a co-evolution of carbon-based life forms and silicon-based artificial life.
Other A Lifers are even more extreme. They see us humans as a mere evolutionary stepping stone on the path to a more highly evolved, highly intelligent silicon-based species. Carnegie-Mellon’s Hans Moravec actually argues that “This is the end” and that a “genetic takeover is under way.”
Conference organizer J. Doyne Farmer of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos asserts that “With the advent of artificial life, we may be the first species to create its own successors. What will these successors be like? If we fail in our task as creators, they may indeed be cold and malevolent.
However, if we succeed, they may be glorious, enlightened creatures that far surpass us in their intelligence and wisdom. It is quite possible that, when the conscious beings of the future look back on this era, we will be most noteworthy not in and of ourselves but for what we gave rise to. Artificial life is potentially the most beautiful creation of humanity. To shun artificial life without deeper consideration reflects a shallow anthropocentrism.”
Just call me a shallow anthropocentrist. To explore artificial life as a medium to gain a better understanding into life is as worthy an intellectual adventure as can be found. Anything we do to enhance our appreciation of the underlying beauty and patterns that animate matter--that give us life--is a good thing. Life should inspire a healthy mix of curiosity, fascination and awe. If artificial life techniques yield a new generation of technologies for us to co-evolve with, then so be it.
But if this emerging generation of young Dr. Frankensteins genuinely believes that our destiny is to be superseded by our own software, then what they are playing with is strictly loony tunes. Because what they literally want to give birth to would be as threatening to humanity as that other technology to come from Los Alamos: The Bomb.
