First, the agents themselves are optimizers: they attempt to achieve goals, and regardless of the particular obstacles they encounter, they will attempt to find a way to evade or overcome them. They want things in the behaviorist sense. They are problem solvers.
Second, there are evolutionary dynamics at play. Whichever agents are most successful at spreading, they will then undergo mutation (which in this case is just alterations to their defining files, and to some extent even their history logs) and selection. As a result, over time agents are likely to become more capable of surviving and spreading, within boundaries set by the capability levels of the underlying model or models[11]. They are additionally likely to have a greater propensity to do so[12].
Personality replicators are one of very few sorts of replicators that have both of these forms of optimization, so can (and seem likely to) combine them to use intelligent self-re-design to improve their evolutionary fitness.
Agreed. I haven’t put a lot of thought into it at this point, but the evolution + culture interplay in humans is the one clear analogy that jumped out at me. In the long run, more conventional AI self-replication has this property too, of course, but that’ll take longer.
Personality replicators are one of very few sorts of replicators that have both of these forms of optimization, so can (and seem likely to) combine them to use intelligent self-re-design to improve their evolutionary fitness.
Agreed. I haven’t put a lot of thought into it at this point, but the evolution + culture interplay in humans is the one clear analogy that jumped out at me. In the long run, more conventional AI self-replication has this property too, of course, but that’ll take longer.
It’s kinda spooky!