Extrobritannia ran a discussion on the Singularity this Saturday at Birkbeck college, with the usual admixture of strong passion and IT focus. Part of the discussion that threw out a line of enquiry for me was the role that Darwinian forces (the pressures of natural selection) would play upon any artificial consciousness. The original response from other participants suggested that the consciousness would be designed and that Darwinian forces would only come into play if this formed part of the programming.
This focus may tell us about the possibilities of constructing an artificial consciousness without illuminating the forces that may come into play when this consciousness moves into bootstrap phase or starts to design its successors, redesign itself, or reproduce and use of these terms could be interchangeable. Whatever terms we wish to use, the forms of artificial consciousness that come into being can be described as living organisms and will, in various strange and arcane ways, duplicate the phenomena of living organisms: they will self-organise and they will self-produce, possibly reproduce. Could we view a postsingularity environment, with these new forms of consciousness, from an ecological point of view? Would this provide insights that economic, social and political interpretations do not bring to bear?
When I raised this point, my initial view was a 'Darwinian default', with the bootstrapping AI conforming to the agenda of natural selection. Whilst this is a possibility and potentially, a bad and simplistic scenario, there is the potential for new systems of information exchange that are rooted in our understanding of evolutionary change. Our theory of mind, enriched by evolutionary psychology, will form the initial template for communication and exchange.