Stretch Article: New Signs of Life

I believe we need to stretch our thinking from time to time. Here is a story that will do just that. What do you think?

Reprinted from Wired Magazine

Living Machines

By Christopher Meyer

Technology and biology are converging fast. The result will transform everything from engineering to art - and redefine life as we know it. Scientific advances point to a startling conclusion: The nonliving world is very much alive.

Copernicus demoted humanity by removing Earth from the center of the universe. Darwin showed that, rather than being made in God's image, people were merely products of nature's experimentation. Now, advances in fields as disparate as computer science and genetics are dealing our status another blow. Researchers are learning that markets and power grids have much in common with plants and animals. Their findings lead to a startling conclusion: Life isn't the exception, but the rule.

The notion that the inorganic world is alive is as old as mythology; think of Poseidon, the Greek personification of the sea. However, the tools available to examine life at its most essential - DNA sequencing, bioinformatics, gene chips - are new. We're beginning to discern life processes at their fundamental level, and as we re-create these processes in silico, we're starting to see how they work in inorganic settings. It turns out that many of life's properties - emergence, self-organization, reproduction, coevolution - show up in systems generally regarded as nonliving.

EMERGENCE describes the way unpredictable patterns arise from innumerable interactions between independent parts. An organism's behavior, for instance, is driven by the interplay of its cells. Similarly, weather develops from the mixing of oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, and other molecules.

SELF-ORGANIZATION is a basic emergent behavior. Plants and animals assemble and regulate themselves independent of any hierarchy for planning or management. Digital simulations made up of numerous software agents have demonstrated self-organization in systems ranging from computer networks to tornadoes.

REPRODUCTION was considered strictly the purview of organisms until recently. Now computer programs procreate, too. Genetic algorithms mimic biology's capacity for innovation through genetic recombination and replication, shuffling 1s and 0s the way nature does DNA's Gs, Ts, As, and Cs, then reproducing the best code for further recombination. This technique has been used to evolve everything from factory schedules to jet engines.

COEVOLUTION inevitably accompanies evolution. When an organism evolves in response to environmental change, it puts new pressures on that environment, which likewise evolves, prompting further evolution in the organism. This cycle occurs in many social systems - for instance, the interaction between behavioral norms and legal codes.

These life properties are already being built into real-world devices, like Sony's robotic dog Aibo; put two of them together and their personalities will coevolve. The line between organisms and machines is beginning to blur.

Consider a hypothetical pod of Predator drones. Each unmanned aerial vehicle monitors terrain, weather, and potential threats, and continuously receives target updates and transmits its findings via satellite. The drones are motivated by two rules: hunger for valuable intelligence and repulsion from other drones to minimize redundant observation. These rules enable the UAVs to direct themselves better than any dispatcher could. Other rules help the fleet survive. When a drone observes a hostile signature - missile, rocket-propelled grenade, rifle fire - it executes an evasive maneuver from a stored repertoire. As Predators live and die by these rules, they generate new information about fitness under various conditions. Genetic algorithms use this data to breed more effective rules. Predators are connected, so if one is shot down over Afghanistan, all drones everywhere gain improved responses to that form of attack. This is precisely how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, only faster.

This sounds far-out until you realize that something similar is already happening on your desktop, when Norton AntiVirus updates virus definitions automatically over the Internet. In fact, networks could play a critical role as machines come to resemble living creatures. In life, as on the Net, connections matter more than processors. The Internet could allow sensors to interact in emergent ways, forming an autonomic nervous system for the physical world. An early version is taking root in Los Angeles, where sensors at intersections identify approaching buses and ask a central computer whether they're on time. Late buses get the green light; the system gives crossing traffic extra time in subsequent cycles. The result: 25 percent improvement in transit times without creating congestion.

Oddly enough, our growing knowledge of life processes could have its biggest impact in the social sciences. Social systems, after all, are made up of interacting agents, i.e., people. When we become adept at applying these insights to the social sphere, we'll be able to run simulations that reveal, say, the conditions under which Iraq would reconstruct itself. At that point, the new science of life will help us not only live better, but live better together.

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