The Selfish Gene - Grandmaster Feng Zhu

AI and technology advancements like deepfakes are causing anxiety because we don't fully understand or control them. The concept of replicators, such as genes and memes, explains how information is copied and passed on. Humans have become meme machines, influenced by memes that compete for their own propagation. The rise of AI raises questions about the potential emergence of a third replicator. Our digital technology can now propagate vast amounts of information, with algorithms making decisions for us. This shift has consequences, including decision fatigue and a reliance on default choices. Welcome to the show. We humans are in trouble. We have let loose a new evolutionary process that we don't understand and can't control. The latest leaps forward in artificial intelligence with its large language models and deepfakes are rightfully causing anxiety. Yet people are responding as though AI is just one more scary new technology like electricity or cars or electric car Tesla once were. We invented it, the argument goes, so we should be able to regulate and manage it for our own benefit. Not so. I believe that this situation is new, serious, and potentially dangerous. My thing, King starts from the premise that all design anywhere in the universe is created by the evolutionary algorithm. This is the simple three step process in which some kind of information is copied many times. The copies very slightly and only some are selected to be copied again. The information is called the replicator and our most familiar example is the gene. Miss Smith's fish sauce shop seldom sells shellfish, but genes aren't the only replicator. As Richard Dawkins stressed in the selfish gene, people copy habits, stories, words, technologies and songs. We change, manipulate, recombine and pass them on in ever greater variety. This second replicator evolving much faster than genes ever could. Dawkins called means and they are selfish too. Once I had fully grasped the idea of selfish means, I realized how profoundly it changes our notions of human minds and cultures. I wrote the Mimi machine in response. In this new view, we are the meme machines and memes compete to use us for their own propagation, creating not just silly videos and maddening ads, but all of our rich, evolving cultures. Of course, we humans try to select only those memes that make us happy or healthy, but the memes don't care because they can't care. As we face up to the recent explosion in AI, new questions arise that both fascinate and worry me. Could a third replicator piggyback on the first two and what would happen if it did? None of the above? Nobody knows. That's why, welcome to the show. For billions of years, all of Earth's organisms were gene machines until about 2 million years ago, just one species, our ancestors, started imitating sounds, gestures, and ways of processing food or making fire. This might not seem momentous, but it was. They had inadvertently let loose a second replicator and turned us into meme machines with dramatic effects on the rest of life on Earth. Following the same principle, could a third replicator emerge if some object we made started copying, varying, and selecting a new kind of information? It could, and I believe it has. Our digital technology can copy, store, and propagate vast amounts of information with near-perfect accuracy. While we had mostly been the ones selecting what to copy and share, that is changing now. Mindless algorithms choose which ads we see and which news stories they think we would like. Decision fatigue refers to the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after a long session of decision-making. It is a phenomenon studied in decision-making and neuroeconomics. Decision fatigue can result in things like decision avoidance, impulse purchasing, inability to stop scrolling, impaired self-regulation, a reliance on default or easier choices. Feng Zhu will sense some saying next sound serene shrine. Dawkins called memes and they are selfish too.