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| - Artificial life is the modeling of complex, lifelike behaviors in a computer program.
- After many years of failing to achieve Strong AI many researchers have instead turned to Artificial Life. The basic premise is, if we can't yet develop human intelligence, perhaps lets start lower down on the totem pole, such as ants, or bugs. Let's model simpler life forms, or create artificial environments or ecosystems. Artificial Life also has applications in biology and is normally related to generic algorithms.
- From 'accelerating the future' (blog): By 2020, creating cybernetic microorganisms capable of entirely displacing their biological equivalents will become feasible in a university lab, with minimal funding. Then the potential problems will begin. Artificial viruses, bacteria, photoplankton, algae, even krill or insects could quickly be produced in great numbers before the end of the second decade of this century, which would then go on to self-replicate beyond our control. This scenario is not only conceivable, but probable - it only takes one successful self-replicator to create a major hassle. If it’s a self-replicator that throws a wrench into human biology in particular, it could kill every person on earth in the time it takes to spread globally. Because artificial organisms will ha
- A-life is short for Artificial life. This entails the study of artificial, simulated organisms - like Norns. A-life is different from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual life. As Steve Grand once put it: For more information, see the Wikipedia article on Artificial life.
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| - From 'accelerating the future' (blog): By 2020, creating cybernetic microorganisms capable of entirely displacing their biological equivalents will become feasible in a university lab, with minimal funding. Then the potential problems will begin. Artificial viruses, bacteria, photoplankton, algae, even krill or insects could quickly be produced in great numbers before the end of the second decade of this century, which would then go on to self-replicate beyond our control. This scenario is not only conceivable, but probable - it only takes one successful self-replicator to create a major hassle. If it’s a self-replicator that throws a wrench into human biology in particular, it could kill every person on earth in the time it takes to spread globally. Because artificial organisms will have the potential for superior performance, they could spread much faster than natural species, while being capable of surviving in a much wider range of niches. Based on the principles of evolvable hardware, we can produce artificial organisms that evolve thousands or millions of times faster than their natural counterparts. Imagine an artificial chloroplast that jumps from cell to cell, plant to plant, continent to continent, rendering their hosts incapable of photosynthesis. source: The concerns about possible danger of an artificial organism are very real, but they apply equally to artificially adapted organisms. These are far more likely in the short term. Naturally evolved parasites, viruses, bacteria develop limitations that allow them to spread. We probably already know enough in principle how to knock out those mechanisms and create an artificial variant that can spread, and that then destroys its host and itself. Because such an evolution is 'artificial' there is no selection for self limitation. In more detail, very few illnesses are both highly contagious and have severe symptoms. However there are illnesses in both classes. Genetic recombination can attach a deadly payload, such as an oncogene, to a highly contagious carrier, with predictable results. I don't see that the ability to create an organism completely from scratch adds anything really new to the mix. 2010 is in any case way too soon for a complete artificial bacterium in my view. We will have a cure for cancer before we have that - which makes the whole problem moot. Rather than a jumping chloroplast, in the near future far more likely is a jumping transposable element (a much shorter piece of DNA) that has undesirable properties and that inserts into the chloroplast. Our lack of knowledge about biological systems could lead us to make really stupendous blunders in this area. For example a possibly desirable trade off for food-crop plants is to make them crop more heavily but be sterile. A transposable element carrying these properties into the wild could be catastrophic. Fortunately the chances are good that because of genetic diversity there would be variants in the wild resistant to the change. Also the chances are good that less dangerous versions of the transposable element would emerge, and would compete with the original artificial one. The ecosystem would recover. The technology we need to worry about is technology that makes transposable DNA more stable. --JC 22:14, 22 October 2006 (UTC) This article is too short. You can contribute by expanding it. Write more on the topic, add good links or edit the text.
- A-life is short for Artificial life. This entails the study of artificial, simulated organisms - like Norns. A-life is different from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual life. As Steve Grand once put it: There's much more to intelligence than logic. Most of the AI pioneers were mathematical magicians and philosophers and to them, thinking was about logic, about reason. But it has to grow out of more primitive systems, and most intelligence is not logical. Most of the time we are not reasoning people. Dogs tend not to argue about syllogisms, but they still seem bright. Chuck IBM's Deep Blue chess computer and a dog into a pond, and see which one climbs out first. Which means that intelligence is grounded in survival. If you haven't got a reason to think, you won't think, and survival is what motivates us. [1] For more information, see the Wikipedia article on Artificial life.
- Artificial life is the modeling of complex, lifelike behaviors in a computer program.
- After many years of failing to achieve Strong AI many researchers have instead turned to Artificial Life. The basic premise is, if we can't yet develop human intelligence, perhaps lets start lower down on the totem pole, such as ants, or bugs. Let's model simpler life forms, or create artificial environments or ecosystems. Artificial Life also has applications in biology and is normally related to generic algorithms.
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