Chapter 87 15.5 Evolution to Harness the Wild

Back in the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin had a hard time convincing his friends that the tiny electric current generated in his laboratory was essentially the same as the lightning that occurred in the wilderness.Partly because his artificial sparks were nothing compared to giant lightning that ripped through the sky, but mostly because those on the sidelines thought Franklin's claim to reproduce nature was counterintuitive. Today, Tom Ray also has trouble convincing his colleagues that the evolution he artificially synthesized in the laboratory is essentially the same as the evolution that shapes plants and animals in nature.The difference in timescales between a few hours of evolution in his world and billions of years in wild nature is also only partly to blame; above all, skeptics also argue that Ray's claim to reproduce an incomprehensible The natural process is counterintuitive.

Two hundred years after Franklin, artificially generated controllable and measurable lightning was introduced into buildings and tools through wires, becoming the most important organizing force in society, especially in digital society.Two hundred years from now, controllable and measurable artificial adaptations will also be introduced into various mechanical devices and become the main organizing force of our society. No computer scientist has yet been able to synthesize a predictably powerful artificial intelligence that can bring about earth-shaking changes.And no biochemist has been able to create artificial life.However, Ray and a few others have captured a piece of evolution and reproduced it to their individual needs.Many technologists believe that a single spark will start a prairie fire, which will lead to the artificial life and artificial intelligence we dream of.It is better to cultivate than to manufacture.

We have used engineering skills to create machines as complex as possible.Today, the projects we face—software programs with tens of millions of lines of code, communication systems that span the globe, factories that must adapt to rapidly changing global buying habits and retool within days, cheap and good robots— — Its complexity can only be solved by evolution. Slow, invisible and lengthy, evolution is an imperceptible ghost in this fast-paced, aggressive world of man-made machines.But I prefer to believe that evolution is a natural technology that can be easily translated into computer code.It is this supercompatibility between evolution and computers that will drive artificial evolution into our digital lives.