High on Information

I've felt this before. As my friends know I don't get high on regular stuff. I keep learning and learning, to my head's content.

I just felt high a moment ago. I am in a new town and I hadn't had time to reflect, just sucking in information coming from my interaction with the environment. I just read in the New Scientist, a piece by the memetics creator, Susan Blackmore, she warns us that we may be in the middle of the birth of a third, as yet unnamed replicator. I'll call it here, tene. for third order gene.

The first, R1, was gene, the second R2, gene, and now meet the R3, third, tene.

What will tene do?

Ms. Blackmore is scared, I guess she should be, I am kind of a stupid robot, that hardly gets scared. So I am not.

I think tene, at first will do squat. If nothing else, gene, and meme, will keep it quiet.

But down the road, it may take over. What is it, then, and what will it do?

Ms. Blackmore says that it is the code in the Internet. It keeps the net moving, and nobody is watching the baby grow.

I worked three years at the 5ESS software administration department at Lucent Technologies, under John Dalby. There I found out a monster that nobody even knew existed. Half a million lines of code, keeping the switch running, without anybody, even less John Dalby, knowning what the beast was doing, as long as customers didn't complain about loosing the conversation with grandma.

To me that was a natural phenomenon, and not a bunch of lines of code written in some locked room. That was a living entity that paid my bills, until the big whigs messed up and told me that "my position", not me, mind you, was no longer necessary.

As far as I know, some of my readers, are still getting their calls answerd by grandma, without me taking tapes around Naperville. The thing is alive, I am telling you.

So I do agree with Ms. Blackmore, the tene is alive, still kicking, and very likely will outlive the previous instances of information. Gene, and meme.

I do predict, that those thingies will keep on going.

What will they do? We better learn, tene language and ask them. Don't ask me.