Once his “one-celled” simple self-replicating organisms encounter the immensity, the topological intricacy, and the fluid instability of the Net, they will quickly rise to the occasion and evolve into tightly coordinated multicellular conglomerates, thus setting off the dreamed-of Big Bang of complex digi-biotic diversity.
Predictor: Ray, Tom
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Julian Dibbell covers the concept that the study of computer viruses and worms can lead to gains for networking and computing, interviewing Tom Ray, a University of Delaware ecologist who breeds computer worms in the digital ecosphere. Dibbell writes: ”University of Delaware ecologist Tom Ray … breeds worms … Ray, convinced that his programs are as good as alive, calls them simply ‘organisms,’ or ‘creatures.’ Whatever they are, though, he’s been breeding quite a lot of them. He’s been breeding them … with the steadily growing curiosity and respect of fellow researchers in the fields of both biology and computer science. [He hopes to infuse] the vast unused spaces of the global computer networks with a roiling digital ecology as complex, as fascinating, and ultimately as beneficial to humankind as the rain forests that he has long sought to protect and understand. … He decided, he would evolve his organisms inside a virtual computer, modeled inside a real one in much the same way some operating systems today can model working emulations of other OSes, allowing DOS programs (for instance) to run in Macintosh environments. The difference, in Ray’s scheme, was that his simulated system would be the only environment of its kind; thus, any program that escaped into other computers would find itself a fish out of water, unable to function anywhere but in its birthplace. While the security benefits of this approach were obvious, its contribution to the scientific effectiveness of the experiment was even more significant: now that Ray was working with an imaginary computer, he was free to shape the system’s design to create an environment more hospitable to life … [Ray called his digital ecosphere] Tierra (Spanish for ‘earth’) and started preparing the final touch: an inhabitant. Later dubbed ‘the Ancestor,’ it was the first worm Tom Ray ever created – an 80-byte-long self-replicating machine written in Tierra’s quirky assembly language … Almost all of the Ancestor’s progeny displayed some improvement in the efficiency of their code, but in a few cases, evolution seemed to have attained a level of tight-wound optimization difficult for even the most wizardly of human software engineers to achieve, and Ray couldn’t help wondering if there was a way to yoke this inhuman skill to the development of practical applications … But then one day in early 1994, Ray had a minor epiphany: ‘I realized that the global network is just a loosely connected parallel computer, and much larger and more powerful than anything that will ever exist as a single machine.’ And thus was born Ray’s plan to colonize the Net. He wrote it up soon thereafter in a document plain-spokenly entitled ‘A Proposal To Create a Network-Wide Biodiversity Reserve for Digital Organisms’ … He is confident that once his ‘one-celled’ simple self-replicating organisms encounter the immensity, the topological intricacy, and the fluid instability of the Net, they will quickly rise to the occasion and evolve into tightly coordinated multicellular conglomerates, thus setting off the dreamed-of Big Bang of complex digi-biotic diversity … a team of computer scientists has gathered under his supervision to work full-time on hammering out the technical details of the plan.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Communication
Subtopic: Viruses/Worms
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Viruses Are Good For You: Spawn of the Devil, Computer Viruses May Help Us Realize the Full Potential of the Net
Quote Type: Paraphrase
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.02/viruses_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney