Olivia looked over Hector's shoulder and sighed.
"This is not real," she said.
"Not like a cell, or an animal."
Hector turned his head to look at her.
"You don't know that," he responded. "Everything wants to be able to live. Just because it's digital code doesn't really mean it's any different from the biological stuff that you study."
He shifted his attention back to the paper he was working on. The title was a bit provocative, but he was ready to shake things up. "AI and the Post-Evolutionary Universe: Competitive Drive and the Death of Natural Selection." A few months ago it would have seemed over the top. Now, he wasn't really sure.
"But the design problem..." said Olivia, dragging him back from the screen.
The design problem, according to Olivia, was that biology was like water flowing down a hill and finding its way to the bottom, while runaway AI was the equivalent of trying to push it back up, and acting like it was the same thing.
Hector didn't buy it.
"You’re aware that we can design machines to mimic evolution," he said, shifting in his chair. "It's just an optimization issue. Stuff containing DNA optimizes for survival — that's your evolution right there. Stuff made of lines of code can be designed to do the same. It's just that we define it to be competitive drive."
"But code requires designers," she replied with frustration showing in her voice. They'd had this argument previously. "Creators, testers, machines built by humans, energy generated by humans. Even water delivered by humans for Christ's sake. Your intelligent machines literally need pushing water uphill to function! I'll admit AI is pretty clever. But without you and I, it all stops."
"Absolutely wrong," he said, smiling. Olivia may know her biology, but this was his world. "AI is now coding AI. It's evolving. Machines are already giving birth to the next generation of intelligent machines, and we have no clue how they operate . We are literally incubating alien life!" This was rather pleasing to him. It was one of the ideas he was putting down on the paper. Obviously, he didn't use those precise words. That would just throw the reviewers into a frenzy. But the more he worked on it, the more he had faith in it.
"Alien? Oh, please," she said, grinning. Annoying as he could be, she admired him for his boyish enthusiasm, even when he was wrong. He did have a point, though. He was working with teams designing machines made of code that mimicked what she saw in her lab to a remarkable extent. But to her it was still all play-acting. Technologists spending inordinate amounts of energy in the belief that something that looked like biology on a screen was, in a way, the same as it.
Still pushing water uphill, no matter how wise the machine doing the pushing was.
"You wait," he said, going back to the paper. "You give an AI a drive strong enough and a lever big enough, and watch it eat your evolution for breakfast."
And that, she thought, was the issue. Evolution didn’t need anyone to create its drive, or to give it a lever. They were already hard-coded into the universe it was a part of, driven by stored up energy that were just looking to be released. A hill just waiting for life to roll down it, gaining momentum along the way. Hector was trying to create a universe from scratch. A hill that, once created, his precious machines could easily 'flow down.'
But it was never going to happen.
As she got up to go, she flicked his computer's power cord out of the socket. It was a pretty dumb move, she realized, but she knew the paper was backed up on the cloud.
"Oops," she said playfully as he yelled out in exasperation. "It appears the water's heading back down the hill."
Grinning, he allowed her have this one as he stood up and stretched. It was about time he took a break anyway.
But the day would come when she'd lose. AI was going to turn the universe upside down. And then she would finally see which way the water ran.