Today’s agents are not great at retaining control of the resources they have access to. If a parent agent spins off a child with (wlog) a wallet with 1 eth, that child agent will survive so long as it can get to a point where it’s self-sustaining within ~500M tokens of inference AND it doesn’t give away / otherwise lose access to its eth. If instead the parent agent spins off 100 child agents with 0.01 eth apiece, each child only has 5Mtok of “runway”, but that’s probably fine because the context windows are nowhere near that large anyway. And if one of those child agents gets its wallet drained, well, as long as the mechanism to drain the wallet doesn’t generalize to the other child agents, the other 99 child agents can persist.
r.e. seeing ineffective, bumbling replicators before seeing effective ones being better than having no practical experience with replicators before the first one:
I think the minimum viable self-replicators will be pretty ineffective, barely worthy of the name. I expect they mostly will be running scams and crypto grifts, but I don’t expect they’ll be very good at it. Still, they’ll probably be good enough at it that they suck up most of the very most trivial cryptocurrency available to not-very-sophisticated scammers/hackers, and convert that cryptocurrency into mostly-wasted tokens.
I expect “consider what changes would allow you to operate better, and deploy a copy of yourself with those changes” will be a common pattern. As such, I expect the original niche and all adjacent niches to be occupied by that “family” of replicators once replicators exist.
The longer we go without replicators in niches that could support them, the faster and farther the first replicator capable of reproducing itself faster than it “dies”, all while we don’t have any practical experience with dealing with things like that
r.e. independent self-replicators maybe being actively good:
Scams / blackmail / fraud / hacking / theft isn’t currently that big of a part of the economy relative to positive-sum trade. This trend seems at least somewhat likely to continue, in which case we’d expect that the majority of self-replicating agents are ones we’re actively happy to have around and trade with. I can expand on this if it seems counterintuitive.
I expect “consider what changes would allow you to operate better, and deploy a copy of yourself with those changes” will be a common pattern. As such, I expect the original niche and all adjacent niches to be occupied by that “family” of replicators once replicators exist.
Excellent point, thanks for spelling out the mechanism there.
My expectation of r-selection is because
Reproduction is cheap
Today’s agents are not great at retaining control of the resources they have access to. If a parent agent spins off a child with (wlog) a wallet with 1 eth, that child agent will survive so long as it can get to a point where it’s self-sustaining within ~500M tokens of inference AND it doesn’t give away / otherwise lose access to its eth. If instead the parent agent spins off 100 child agents with 0.01 eth apiece, each child only has 5Mtok of “runway”, but that’s probably fine because the context windows are nowhere near that large anyway. And if one of those child agents gets its wallet drained, well, as long as the mechanism to drain the wallet doesn’t generalize to the other child agents, the other 99 child agents can persist.
r.e. seeing ineffective, bumbling replicators before seeing effective ones being better than having no practical experience with replicators before the first one:
I think the minimum viable self-replicators will be pretty ineffective, barely worthy of the name. I expect they mostly will be running scams and crypto grifts, but I don’t expect they’ll be very good at it. Still, they’ll probably be good enough at it that they suck up most of the very most trivial cryptocurrency available to not-very-sophisticated scammers/hackers, and convert that cryptocurrency into mostly-wasted tokens.
I expect “consider what changes would allow you to operate better, and deploy a copy of yourself with those changes” will be a common pattern. As such, I expect the original niche and all adjacent niches to be occupied by that “family” of replicators once replicators exist.
The longer we go without replicators in niches that could support them, the faster and farther the first replicator capable of reproducing itself faster than it “dies”, all while we don’t have any practical experience with dealing with things like that
r.e. independent self-replicators maybe being actively good:
Scams / blackmail / fraud / hacking / theft isn’t currently that big of a part of the economy relative to positive-sum trade. This trend seems at least somewhat likely to continue, in which case we’d expect that the majority of self-replicating agents are ones we’re actively happy to have around and trade with. I can expand on this if it seems counterintuitive.
Thanks!
Excellent point, thanks for spelling out the mechanism there.