(gentle music) - You mentioned the idea of out, outtelligence. - Artificial outtelligence. - Artificial outtelligence. The idea is quite compelling, it's quite unique and new, and at least from my view, a stance point. Maybe you can explain it. - Sure. What I was thinking about is why it is that we're waiting to be terrified by artificial general intelligence when in fact artificial life is terrifying in and of itself and it's already here.

So in order to have a system of selective pressures, you need three distinct elements. You need variation within a population, you need heritability, and you need differential success. So what's really unique about software is that if you think about what humans know how to build, that's impressive. So I always take a car and I say, does it have an analog of each of the physiological systems?

Does it have a skeletal structure, that's its frame. Does it have a neurological structure, has an onboard computer, has a digestive system? The one thing it doesn't have is a reproductive system. But if you can call spawn on a process, effectively you do have a reproductive system. And that means that you can create something with variation, heritability, and differential success.

Now, the next step in the chain of thinking was where do we see inanimate, non-intelligent life, outwitting intelligent life? And I have two favorite systems and I try to stay on them so that we don't get distracted. One of which is the Ophrys orchid subspecies, or subclade, I don't know what to call it.

- Is it a type of flower? - Yeah, it's a type of flower that mimics the female of a pollinator species in order to dupe the males into engaging, it was called pseudocopulation, with the fake female, which is usually represented by the lowest petal. And there's also a pheromone component to fool the males into thinking they have a mating opportunity.

But the flower doesn't have to give up energy in the form of nectar as a lure because it's tricking the males. The other system is a particular species of mussel, Lampicillus in the clear streams of Missouri. And it fools bass into biting a fleshy lip that contain its young.

And when the bass see this fleshy lip, which looks exactly like a species of fish that the bass like to eat, the young explode and clamp onto the gills and parasitize the bass and also use the bass to redistribute them as they eventually release. Both of these systems, you have a highly intelligent dupe being fooled by a lower life form.

And what is sculpting these convincing lures? It's the intelligence of previously duped targets for these strategies. So when the target is smart enough to avoid the strategy, those weaker mimics fall off. They have terminal lines and only the better ones survive. So it's an arms race between the target species that is being parasitized, getting smarter, and this other less intelligent or non-intelligent object getting as if smarter.

And so what you see is that artificial general intelligence is not needed to parasitize us. It's simply sufficient for us to outwit ourselves. So you could have a program, let's say, one of these Nigerian scams that writes letters and uses whoever sends it Bitcoin to figure out which aspects of the program should be kept, which should be varied and thrown away, and you don't need it to be in any way intelligent in order to have a really nightmarish scenario of being parasitized by something that has no idea what it's doing.

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