Well... I guess the creationists will be up in arms.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8435320.stm

Prions are capable of adapting and evolving via protein folding and protein folding is how you get RNA and DNA.

I know. You imagine they'll just ignore the evidence as usual but... This is kind of the missing link between lifeless chemical reactions and living creatures.

We've been able to produce amino acids out of base chemicals for many decades now. If prion folding behavior can be decoded, we can make a synthetic environment to accelerate the process that compacts them into a structure like RNA or DNA and from there, you can get a completely man-made organism without borrowing pieces from anything else.

This is also potentially quite exciting for the development of self-replicating nano machines.

Hurray future!

Oooh. Now this is neat.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081105-dark-flow_2.html

At lunch time today, while I was drawing, I observed ants. Fascinating things. You could probably figure out every single human behavior by watching them if you thought about it.

Watching them today, I realized that each and every ant you see has everything that's needed to make an AI that could in time reach human levels of intelligence. There's no need to try to understand the human brain to make it happen. You could study the brain of a tiny insect, maybe a few hundred neurons and you should be able to figure it out.

Ants are inquisitive. Place some new item near their scent trail and they'll stop and investigate it. They determine if it's a threat, a resource, or not of interest, and once it is identified, they take action, but it's that curiosity that is the important key bit.

The other thing that ants have is fear. If they assess something as a threat, they will either attack it or run from it, dependent on the nature of the threat.

Both of these are functions of the same need. Self preservation. That's probably the core of what you need for creating a learning AI. It needs a huge quantity of resources but not an infinite quantity of resources. It needs self preservation and a bit of random alteration. I get the feeling that, given sufficient time, space, and resources, you would get everything you see in humans.

The problems for making this work are 1) Inspiring a survival behavior. 2) Generating an environment with both enough materials to support the initial seed development time and complex and finite enough to make evolution work in favor of the virtual organisms.

Computer viruses and the internet are close. What if the goals of a computer virus were not just replication but also grabbing bits of resources from the system, adding instructions to itself from those pieces letting those replicate as well. Say: Each living virus has an initial set of 3 actions. 1) Replicate two exact copies of itself. 2) Replicate a copy with an added code string stolen from the system. 3) Replicate a copy with part of its own codestring modified by a piece it swiped from the system. 99.9999% of them would die but some very fractional number of them would survive, probably mostly filled with NO-OP instructions. Human would respond to the 'much too successful' versions of said virii, causing the 'comet strikes' that ended the dinosaurs, but other strains would survive and continue to grow and change, doing something or nothing, being more or less successful than their cousins.

It would be interesting to see who would win. People who kill computer viruses or the evolutionary process of the viruses. Of course, with any success, whoever created the primitive animal would become one of the most reviled humans to have ever lived.

I do think it's an interesting idea though. The purpose of life would be to have no purpose except to be life. That's probably where we've really gone wrong with AIs. we assert purpose to them. They fail because we constrain them.