Are we the von Neumann machines Self rep

Are we the von Neumann machines? Self-replication and ecophagy by Bogna Konior

Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.1 Behold a human. There he is, readying himself for death. He does not know that he is readying himself, but what else is life if not dying a bit more each day? We say that we are living a life but it would be more precise to say that we are dying one. Every day, our bodies work less well, or we are pulled out of existence abruptly: in both cases, this life of ours seeps out of us into the cosmos, polluting its fabric, embroidering bits of us into the universe. Of course, we do not think about this very often. The low hum of panic - the anxiety of dying a life - is the background of our days, accepted peacefully at the level of abstract reasoning but greeted with panic by our bodies, which cannot forever repress 1 the sensation of their own disintegration. Eric K. Drexler. "Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology." Anchor Book, 1986.

Subconscious fear is processed passively in the body as a host of mystifying symptoms: rashes, illnesses, pains, cramps, aches. It is also processed actively as reproduction: making copies of ourselves as a practice of partial immortality. “What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness?”2 The fish thinks: extinction, tornado, eternal life, end of the world, heaven, hell, alien abduction, nuclear war. The number of eschatologial scenarios created by human civilisations from time immemorial to now would take days to list.3 These scenarios are a marvel of biology: we are a species that evolved to think not only of our individual demise, but the end of life itself, or the end of the very substance of the universe. Nanotechnological existential risk scenarios concerning tiny self-replicating machines Stephen King. The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger. Vol. 1. Simon and Schuster, 2017. Bogna Konior. "Apocalypse Memes for the Anthropocene God: Mediating Crisis and the Memetic Body Politic."Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, ed. Bown and Bristow. Punctum Press, 2019, 45 76. 2 3

consuming the Earth's ecosystem lie somewhere between science-fiction, scientific hypothesis, tech gossip, and policy recommendation. Now disproved, they speculate that nanotechnological molecules could exponentially self-replicate until they consume all biomass on Earth, a scenario known as “ecophagy,” the act of consuming the environment wholesale, like a Titan in ancient Greek mythology. Indeed, paleontologist Peter Ward coined the “Medea Hypothesis” to describe a theory of life on Earth that tends towards death on Earth.4 In contrast to the benevolent Gaia hypothesis, in which the planet is a collaborative, life-sustaining organism, Ward proposes that life on Earth is suicidal, and most extinctions were caused by reactionary microbes who want to restate their microbial dominance over the rest of life on the planet. The idea of autonomous, microscopic, self-replicating machines reached the height of popularity around the 1980s in the United States. Four decades prior, mathematician Peter Ward. The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately self-destructive? Princeton University Press, 2009. 4

Joseph von Neumann proposed that macro-scale self-replicating machines will one day exist. Speculating on machine self-replication, von Neumann discovered that evolution requires that an agent is able to pass on information to offspring separately from itself, an insight that foreshadowed the discovery in the 1950s of DNA translation and replication by the cell. With advancements in nanotechnology, hypothetical von Neumann machines became more elusive and smaller, and in K. Eric Drexler’s book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, the gray goo hypothesis was described for the first time. Many still blame the popular book for stalling research in nanotechnology. Hypothetically able to convert ‘host’ mass to nanomass, therefore turning the whole ecosystem into themselves, nanobots resembled a hi-tech virus. Both viruses and nanobots show us that “evolution only needs three things to occur: variation, selection, and replication.” 'Life' is not on

the list.5 It is difficult to overstate just how astounding it is that humans are capable of not only decoding but utilizing principles of reproduction different to ours. Some roboticists look to viral self-replication as a template for developing self-replicating robots (though not very small ones). Roboticists working at Hod Lipson’s Lab art Cornell University write code following principles of viral replication, creating "[a] digital universe filled with numerical organisms that reproduced, had numerical sex, repaired ‘genetic’ damage and parasitised one another." They observed computer programs swapped code as they engaged in algorithmic reproduction. Virologist Nils Barricelli uses the term “symbioorganisms” to describe self-reproducing entities in binary code.6 Self-replication is an ancient competitor of sexual reproduction: humans and viruses have been in competition since time immemorial.7 If we have a semblance of ancestral 5 Lucca Fraser, “Disengagement and Drift,” 2019, https://feralmachin.es/posts/parasitic_disengagement.md Emily Monosson, “Robot Evolution,” 2013, https://aeon.co/essays/can-life-evolve-from-wires-and-plastic Katherine Hayles, “Novel Corona: Posthuman Virus,” 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/17/novel-corona-posthuman-virus/ 6 7

memory, it is only natural that we might be anxious about self-replication. We might use our sophisticated prefrontal cortex to trick ourselves into thinking that evolutionary competition is not the main goal of all life on Earth, but we are in a deadly battle with other forms of being. Parallels between technological and biological evolution are as terrifying as they are awe-inspiring; some would say, sublime. As Emily Monosson puts it, “if viruses can evolve within hours, computer code can do it within fractions of a second. Viruses are dumb; computers have processors that might some day surpass our own brains."8 While put to rest as an existential threat on policy level, the gray goo hypothesis tells us much about today's existential fears of extinction and inhuman invasion. Biotechnology, autonomous weapons, the plague, ‘we are polluting the planet!’, have Psychologically your pick of end-of-days alienated both from scenarios. ‘nature’ and ‘technology,’ man experiences both as a threat. Having inoculated himself from nature with technology, and having 8 Monosson, “Robot Evolution.”

subsequently made that technology functional to the point of being natural, man, in a paranoid posture that he assumed for many centuries, perceives himself as if in a fortress and under assault. Planetary state change is experienced as an invasion when both poles of the transition - ‘nature’ and ‘technology’ - appear to us in forms of macro- and microscopic replicators, alien to our human logic of sexual reproduction. For Drexler, the gray goo scenario would be a depressing ending to humanity because it could “stem from a simple laboratory accident.”9 No malice, evil, or moral judgment on the failings of humanity would need to be exerted. In a much discussed article by historian of modernity Dipesh Chakravarty, climate change is similarly described as an accident produced by our industrial culture. In an extraordinary argument, he sketches how we have ‘stumbled’ into what is now called the Anthropocene (the Age of Man), a product of a contingent cosmic shift: 9 Drexler, Engines of Creation.

Take the case of the agricultural revolution, so called, of ten thousand years ago. It was not just an expression of human inventiveness. It was made possible by certain changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a certain stability of the climate, and a degree of warming of the planet that followed the end of the Ice Age (the Pleistocene era)—things over which human beings had no control . . . “There can be little doubt,” writes one of the editors of Humans at the End of the Ice Age, “that the basic phenomenon—the waning of the Ice Age—was the result of the Milankovich phenomena: the orbital and tilt relationships between the Earth and the Sun.” Without this lucky “long summer” or what one climate scientist has called an “extraordinary” “fluke” of nature in the history of the planet, our industrial-agricultural way of life would not have been possible.10 And so, studying the convergence between technological and ecological changes presents us with no 10 Dipesh Chakrabarty. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 217-218.

simple moral causality, and offers no clear villains and heroes. Judging from existing eschatological scenarios, we’d much prefer it if civilisation ended by way of punishment than by chance or by an inhuman logic. From religious to secular upheaval, end of the world scenarios are usually accompanied by feverish moral panic and scapegoating, where one group is blamed, practically metaphysically, for all evil in the world: ‘evil’ scientists, capitalists and technocrats, or corporate greed. A rarely considered gray goo scenario under the name “malicious ecophagy” stages a conflict between human and bot reproduction instead. In this hypothesis, nanobots purposefully and maliciously self-replicate in order to attack animals that reproduce sexually. We have “goodbots” and “badbots,” the former defending humanity and the latter attacking it. Tellingingly, in Freitas’ review of this scenario, the badbots enter the human body like a virus, and drill through animal tissues: a deadly explosion of self-replication within a mammal body. There are also more spiritual iterations. It is interesting to read Greg Bear’s 1985 novel Blood Music alongside serious

policy recommendations from the same decade. In the novel, the gray goo hypothesis is also a parable of artificial intelligence. What begins as an immunological invasion of the human body ends in a transcendent finale as trillions of single-cells nanobots become intelligent. The novel works from the premise that reality is the function of its observers, so when the nanobots become intelligent, they mutate the whole terran ecosystem just by registering it in their hivemind. The book's ending, when humanity is terraformed by the nanobots, is glorious in its ecstatic species-wide phase change. As dated or fantastical as nanotechnological risk may look to us today, its implications are distinctly contemporary. In a paper dating back to 2000, one of the first to present a systematic overview of the gray goo existential risk scenario, “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations,” Robert A. Freitas Jr. already makes the connection between

nanobots and climate change.11 If there are too many nanobots replicating at once, they will accelerate biosphere warming. In addition, nanobots would perceive all biomass as accumulators of energy to be ‘eaten:’ Ecophagic nanorobots would regard living things as environmental carbon accumulators, and biomass as a valuable ore to be mined for carbon and energy. Of course, biosystems from which all carbon has been extracted can no longer be alive but would instead become lifeless chemical sludge. Ironically, Freitas' description of what nanobots could do to biomass is what humans are (kind of) doing to biomass. Humans convert biomass to energy to reproduce not only ourselves in the flesh but also in artifice: if we consider technology as the extension of human bodies and senses, we are replicating ourselves through our technologies and cultures, rather than only by having children. Philosopher Patricia MacCormack criticises human sexual reproduction Robert A. Freitas Jr. “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations,” Foresight Institute, 2000, https://foresight.org/nano/Ecophagy.php 11

as a form of transhumanism, that is, seeking immortality.12 But what about human asexual reproduction? If we take the proposition of media theorists like Marshall McLuhan seriously - that media are the extensions of man - we are also reproducing by converting biomass into artifice, not unlike what the nanobots are imagined to do in the gray goo hypothesis.13 When we convert biomass into cultural and technical artefacts, we are reproducing asexually - is this not simply a slightly different reading of the well-accepted theory of memetics, of how ideas and cultures evolve through selection, variation, and replication? Are we the von Neumann machines? Von Neumann’s self-replicating machines are, of course, a machine counterpart of life, which is by default able to reproduce. To consider humans as von Neumann machines is to consider technological evolution as part of human reproduction. Technological reproduction, be it through artificial life, artificial intelligence or simply cultural Patricia MacCormack in a recorded debate, available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b5fn5JhFhk 13 Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT press, 1994. 12

artifacts, is not about making exact copies. Neither is sexual reproduction, unless we speak about cloning rather than having babies. When we convert biomass into technology, we are self-replicating: extending ourselves through selection, repetition and alternation. Just like the hypothetical nanobots, we are converting biomass into artifice as a way of extending the lifespan of our species. The result of this ecophagy remains to be seen, but in this scenario, rather than speculating about microbots invading our bodies, we are the bots invading the ecosystem and converting it into technology.