[ExI] The coming meme wars

[Anders Sandberg]

On 29/09/2012 18:47, Charlie Stross wrote:
> On 29 Sep 2012, at 14:42, David Lubkin<lubkin at unreasonable.com>  wrote:
>
> I see how this could be very useful, but I keep flashing to Stephen
> Baxter's One True.
> John Barnes, surely?
>

My thought too. Slightly misleading subject.

A nifty idea, though. A bit like the mcguffin in my "Death of the 
dragons" setting where the aliens who originally seeded life on Earth 4 
billion years ago used it as a biological internet. The real 
civilisation is still down there in the lithoautothropic zone, slow and 
huge - the surface biosphere is just some random devolved stuff.

I wonder if something like this could be used to do on-the-fly gene 
therapy in organisms. Of course they have to be prepared with the right 
sender and receiver infrastructure in the genome, but that seems doable.

So maybe we can get gene hacking wars. One morning you all wake up with 
fluorescent oxytocin producing crosses on your foreheads...

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University