Evolving Machines and the Global Consciousness

There were two highly interesting tech pieces mentioned on Slashdot recently. In the first item, researchers at Michigan State University have created a digital evolution laboratory, and came up with some disturbing results:

Scientists there have created virus-like computer programs that replicate, mutate randomly, and compete with each other... in other words, they evolve. Among such feats as learning to add and compare numbers, these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at "killing" them, by playing dead.

Here's a link to the item on Slashdot and here's the project's web page and here's a link to the Discover Magazine article about it. Best of all, you can download the project and create artificial life on your home PC. What's interesting about this experiment is the blurring of the difference between biological and digital life. Will these little buggers ever get loose? At least they probably don't eat much.

In the second item, researchers at Princeton are looking at the output of random number generating computers around the world. Their theory is--in a somewhat oversimplified version--a form of human global consciousness can effect the generation of numbers and make it less random. They claim that they have seen changes in the output associated with major world events like the 9/11 attacks and the Asian tsunami. What's much more interesting is that they claim that these anomalies occur before the event actually takes place.

For during the course of the experiment, the Eggs [the number generators] have 'sensed' a whole series of major world events as they were happening, from the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia to the Kursk submarine tragedy to America's hung election of 2000. The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations, such as New Year's Eve.

But the project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11, 2001. As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs. Not only had they registered the attacks as they actually happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers had begun four hours before the two planes even hit the Twin Towers.
They had, it appeared, detected that an event of historic importance was about to take place before the terrorists had even boarded their fateful flights. The implications, not least for the West's security services who constantly monitor electronic 'chatter', are clearly enormous.

Is global consciousness causing these machines to see into the future? You be the judge. Here's a link to the Slashdot item and here's the original story in tech site Red Nova. Skeptics have not ignored this. Click here for an article in Skepticreport.com about the phenomenon. Although the writer suggests that the researchers are cherry picking their data, even he thinks there may be something going on,

Is something happening? If we can refrain from equating "anomalies" with "psi", it does seem that something is going on. Whether it is flawed research or a real phenomenon is still out. But when we take into account that [the researchers] are not all that eager to falsify their own theories (as well as quoting Sagan and Hyman out of context to support their own agenda when in fact neither do!), it is very hard for me to accept that a real phenomenon is happening.

Also at Princeton, other researchers are looking at the way that human consciousness, this time at an individual level, can effect mechanical processes One Slashdot commentator writes,

There is another very bizarre phenomenon being studied at Princeton that is related and apparently shares a lot of the same hardware. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research project was started to study the human machine interface, and quickly determined that humans, individually and collectively, can have a small influence on truly random events. The effect doesn't extend to pseudorandom events such as a PC's "random" number generator, which is actually deterministic. The magnitude of the effect varies with the individual(s) involved, but is on the order of one in ten thousand. However, this small result is statistically proved beyond any reasonable doubt. The experiments have been widely replicated by different researchers using different random events (Johnson noise in resistors, balls falling through a long sequence of pegs ala pachinko, etc.) Even more bizarre is the way the effect is not limited by time or space. People from the other side of the world have influenced random events, and if my memory is correct, random events in sealed experiments have been altered by human efforts in the future and the past.

Could entreprenurial crime fighters use this technology? Perhaps we could place random number generators in each precinct and use them to predict crime trends before they happen. Compstat could use the number spikes to deluge an area with police officers and thereby change the future.

But then the random number generators would not have spiked and the cops would not have been sent in to begin with. But then the future would not have been altered and the numbers would spike after all. I'm getting a headache. Chief, don't mind the glowing omnipotent AI in the office, it's simply predicting future crime. And evolving.

This item is cross-posted over at OmapBlog. Yes, I know I'm being lazy.
- posted by Base10 @ 8:26 PM