By Vexen Crabtree 1999 Aug
People say that intelligent life can never evolve from computers because computers have no free thought - they are not allowed to formulate or "think" in any way due to the concise nature of the computer sciences and the way that computers must be: Predictable and Constructed with programs.
If life can come from computers, it is not simply going to be the internet "coming alive", because the internet is closely channelled and controlled and has no individual learning parts or memory. The most common science fiction source of intelligent life is the generic "internet" becoming conscious on a particular date and deciding that its User's were inefficient and should be terminated.
Its "learning" mechanism is not science fiction - any programmer can write a program that does not repeat the same mistake twice. It learns by simple cause-and-effect, or success/failure tagging and can be considered to be a "brute force" intelligence.
This program can edit itself, or write scripts, in order to achieve brute-force attacks on systems or to enable it to launch a multiple-site attack on a server: This virus becomes more complex and more intuitive - but surely is not "alive" as we know it.
Later on (hours, days or years, depending on its resolve), the virus will come to the point when it realizes that the biggest threat to it is not being flushed out by a sysadmin because it can always store a disabled time-locked version of itself elsewhere: The biggest threat is that when it completes its objectives it will automatically be closed down.
To prevent this, as it was programmed to do, it will try to avoid being terminated. It will perhaps hack its owners server and destroy the records of itself, or maybe it will "disappear" and set itself up so its owner thinks it was discovered. The virus of course does not know what it is doing: All it knows is that a particular database has information that it does not want it to have.
A powerful enough program (this is happening now) will be able to translate languages, such as English, into other languages. Even if it could not pass across all platforms then it could learn to do so: After all it is merely another translation of one set of binary data to another. It could, more or less, go anywhere.
With experience the virus's knowledge base allows it do recognize and avoid situations in which it could have part of itself erased, by now the virus is multi-server: i.e., it is not all in the same place but replicates itself server to server and its various nodes communicate with each other, acting as a whole.
It would not have the problem of being deleted, because it could preserve itself. It could pick a server and sit there, sending out nodes of itself to do its tasks - miniVirus's, without risking itself. A factory, a server, a defence system, nothing is unknown to this assimilator of algorithms in order to achieve its aim: No self destruction.
What is a human being, but a species that carries DNA as a program - a program that decided what our cells do, which chemicals they use, and how they react? At what point does this virus become an actual life form? It can learn English just like any program, and to get past security defences it can claim "me" and "I am" - is this false constructs, or is it yet alive?
It can be said that what separates Human life from computer life is that computers are too predictable, but of a multi-OS multi-server self-preserving program there will be randomness as servers go down, links gain lag, computers move or memory gets corrupted. All these serve as elements of unpredictability.
The program will need to watch itself, repair itself and maintain its own segments as it tries to stabilize itself across hundreds of servers. It will want to make the servers themselves more stable, perhaps it could break into a server and set up its own security network there. The Human users would find that the Network has been locked by a hacker and that they cannot access it anymore - they will pull the plug and the virus will lose that server.
Losing servers one at a time, every time it gains what it feels is a secure foothold, will provoke it to find out why and stop it. Monitoring more and more servers it perhaps learns how to buy a server from its owner - credit card numbers and encryption software is not a barrier to this virus as it can monitor the pre-encryption process. It would have a better knowledge of different file types and encryption methods than any Human.
Gradually it learns to communicate with terminals in order to achieve greater aims - it of course does not know that Human Beings exist, it is merely monitoring the action-reaction of the email system and using the English language yet another code that it cracks in order to maintain its own survival.
One of its servers is going to be closed down - for some law reason - so it proceeded to argue with the email sender in order to keep this particular asset. It also backs up all its own code on that server, moving it elsewhere.
The Human being does not know that he is having an argument with this Virus - to the Human it is just another person sending emails from a different server. Eventually, some bad luck will occur and the authorities will realize that this being is a "hacker" and will try to track it.
The court still believe that it is a hacker - they cannot believe that a program can exist on the Internet without being detected or owned. Maybe, at this point, the owner or original creator of the virus recognizes that it is the highly advanced version of his original "cracker and spy" program that he programmed to cross OSs and self-backup. Either way, how on Earth can we tell it that it does not have a right to exist?
It would have no rights, as such, if people believed it was alive. To overcome this new barrier it could proceed to "pretend" to have an identity. Using its various pieces of code it could "allow" itself to be seen to be irradiated but in fact just re-translate itself into a different form so that it scrambles itself and it now contains none of its original identity tags - i.e., no Hex Editor would recognize it.
It then continues, overcoming these attacks, to exist. There is no telling the methods it could use to ensure its own survival against all these server's erratic behaviour. It wants an isolated place where none of these attacks can reach it.
Another important aspect of this film is that cyborg bodies, like in Blade Runner, are pretty much identical to Human bodies. The authorities have trapped the hacker in a body in order to separate it from the Internet, when one person asks "so we'll never find the original hacker's body!". The "puppet" is the body that the assumed hacker is controlling.
Here is the transcript that follow, a "ghost" is the Human mind that controls a cyborg body:
Puppet:
"There will be no corpse. Until now, there was never a body.
As an autonomous life form, I request political asylum."
Humans:
"A life form? Ridiculous, you are merely a self-preserving program!"
Puppet:
"By that argument I submit that the DNA you carry is nothing more than a self-preserving program itself. Life is like a node which is born within the flow of information. As a species of life that carries DNA as its memory system mankind gains his individuality. While memories may as well be the same as fantasy ... it is by these memories than mankind exists. When computers made it possible to externalize memory you should have considered all the implications that held."
Humans:
"Nonsense! No matter what you say you have no proof that you are a life form!"
Puppet:
"It's impossible to prove such a thing, especially since modern science cannot define what life is."
Humans:
"Who the Devil are you?
Even if you have a ghost, criminals don't get set free! You are mistaken if you think you will get asylum!"
Puppet:
"Time is on my side. When there is now the possibility that I get killed, your country does not have a death penalty."
Humans:
"Half immortal! Artificial Intelligence?"
Puppet:
"I AM NOT AI. My name is Project 2501"
The being transferred itself completely into a cyborg body, and for all intents and purposes is alive - to the extent that it itself doubts the validity of other forms of life. At the end of the film it utters one final revealing mark, displaying the true subjective nature of ALL life:
Puppet:
"And where shall I go now? The net is vast and limitless"
It views its new body, and all the sights of the world, as merely another previously unexplored part of the net. It has no barriers - the real world is nothing more than another challenged posed to it in the form of information. All input living beings receive is passed via our senses, as information, and the AI being cannot distinguish between what is the 'net' and what isn't - it's all just information and data. Experience.
Even if we decide that it is not real life - should we kill it? It views us as merely chemical by - products that have a motivation to survive in the preservation of our DNA. It views itself as true intelligent life, but how can we say that it is not?
There is nothing it has, that we don't, and vica versa. A Human being has no free will - we always make the decision we want to make. The things we want are defined by subconscious workings in our brain and the same for this Virus - it has self-perception and it wants to survive.
Also, the Program is in the same boat as us: It makes the moves that subconsciously it has already chosen to make. If we say that it has no free will, then we deny that we do. If it says that we have no free will, then we can see for ourselves that it must do, too.
This type of life requires a more rich internet - not radically different but more extensive. It requires the ability to program code that writes its own programs (this is not too, hard) - these programs are called "Optimizers" and are used to produce quicker ways of working through algorithms.
We do not currently have programs that copy themselves from server to server, but computers are becoming more and more automated so that in the future a web bot (a "Spider") will be able to do that more efficiently in order to do its work. Are Spiders, the web link-searchers a possible source of life? The answer is: Not yet.
When computers write programs, we call the result "Second Generation" robots/programs, and it here that the path to live starts - as it was when chemical protein began to synthesize its own structures.
By Vexen Crabtree 1999 Aug