Archives: Expert Predictions

If we were to shrink from the chance to actively participate in transforming the Net into the single most complex information entity since the emergence of the human brain, would we not then be shirking a duty of almost cosmic proportions? It could happen. It’s hard to say which is really the more characteristically human trait – our drive toward complexity or our sometimes irrational fear of it … In the end, the meaning of our long-term coexistence with computer viruses may prove difficult to distinguish from the meaning of our own existence.

Trying to imagine the marvels that pour forth once you’ve successfully tapped a computer as elaborate as the Net is as futile as trying to map the future of a society, or of a life – or of life itself. Of course, trying to foresee the risks that could emerge from that same computer is an equally hopeless task. But as it happens, we are bound to face those risks whether or not we seek to harness the full power of the Net, since the teeming and inevitable population of uncaged digital organisms will in any case plow forward with its own relentless exploration of the Net’s capabilities.

The fact that all the interpreters speak the same programming language regardless of the underlying operating system and hardware means that, as the base of interpreters approaches omnipresence on the world’s computer networks, the Net approaches the condition of a single, vast, and unmappable supercomputer, with each wandering digital organism a process in one worldwide parallel computation … With the advent of protocols like Telescript and Tierra, do we have the means to deploy such processes that treat the Net as one machine, safely and sensibly.

If the Darwinian innovations introduced by Mark Ludwig are any indication of coming trends in viral technique, then it’s not inconceivable that a vital ecology might someday flourish in the midst of our daily routines, unplanned, uncontained, ill-comprehended, and irrepressible. It’s an unnerving prospect. Yet it wouldn’t have to be – not if we prepared for it by actively cultivating a digital biodiversity of the sort Tom Ray proposes. This is a niche that will be filled, whether we fill it deliberately or not.