Why aren’t we a single organism? That is why doesn’t a single bacteria that is better than all the rest at cooperating and replicating take over the world? That is why didn’t biology green goo itself.
There are a few different aspects of this question.
1.Why aren’t we in the process of this constantly. That is why isn’t an asexual bacteria looking like it is doing this right now? Sexuality is a tricky question for biology, from a selfish gene point of view it doesn’t make much sense to chuck away half your genes and mix them with another organisms. The best answer we have is monocultures of bacteria/species are susceptible to parasitism and it makes sense to ditch half your genes to protect your offspring from that. In the AI case this argues for variation in robotics/software so that you do not get entirely owned by other AIs if they discover a weak point. Variation might lead to unpredictability/principle agent problems.
2. Would a global monoculture of bacteria be stable if it were to exist (if might have happened with the first reliable replicator)? This seems unlikely for a couple of reasons. The first is cancer, that is replicators or machinery that has degraded and is malfunctioning can wipe out the whole system if there are no boundaries or protective mechanisms. The bigger the system and also the longer the system exists the more likely you are to get cancer or something like it. On astronomical times scales you have to worry about very weird things quantum tunneling around the place. You might also want boundaries between systems to protect against auto-immune disorders, assuming you have some clean up mechanism on old/destroyed machinery that also gets old and might malfunction in weird ways attacking the rest of the system.
Another related question comes from biology.
Why aren’t we a single organism? That is why doesn’t a single bacteria that is better than all the rest at cooperating and replicating take over the world? That is why didn’t biology green goo itself.
There are a few different aspects of this question.
1.Why aren’t we in the process of this constantly. That is why isn’t an asexual bacteria looking like it is doing this right now? Sexuality is a tricky question for biology, from a selfish gene point of view it doesn’t make much sense to chuck away half your genes and mix them with another organisms. The best answer we have is monocultures of bacteria/species are susceptible to parasitism and it makes sense to ditch half your genes to protect your offspring from that. In the AI case this argues for variation in robotics/software so that you do not get entirely owned by other AIs if they discover a weak point. Variation might lead to unpredictability/principle agent problems.
2. Would a global monoculture of bacteria be stable if it were to exist (if might have happened with the first reliable replicator)? This seems unlikely for a couple of reasons. The first is cancer, that is replicators or machinery that has degraded and is malfunctioning can wipe out the whole system if there are no boundaries or protective mechanisms. The bigger the system and also the longer the system exists the more likely you are to get cancer or something like it. On astronomical times scales you have to worry about very weird things quantum tunneling around the place. You might also want boundaries between systems to protect against auto-immune disorders, assuming you have some clean up mechanism on old/destroyed machinery that also gets old and might malfunction in weird ways attacking the rest of the system.