One of the most important discoveries of the last 200 years was Darwin’s theory of evolution. You are almost certainly educated in the ways and whys and wherefores of evolution, but here’s a quick recap: through multiple generations of a species, there is a process which ensures the survival of the fittest and the demise of the weakest. At its most basic, this process whittles out bad DNA mutations and embraces the good — but extrapolated out through billions of years, and it is the reason that girls prefer taller boys, and why we instinctively revere the leaders and generals of our society.
The thing about Darwin’s theory of evolution is that it only applies to biology, to organic, living things — it only applies to genetic traits that are carried on from generation to generation. What if evolution also applies to ideas, to behaviors — to memes? What if memetic traits can also be passed down through generations — or across the broad tree of your species using communication?
Are memes biological? They certainly can’t be explained by biologists or chemists, which strongly hints that memes are inorganic. In its raw, neurological, synapse-firing state you could probably call an idea biological — but memes can also exist as written works, websites, and recorded transmissions. Memes, in other words, can exist outside an organism’s cell walls, and thus freely exist without human intervention.
So, what are computers and machines? They are the physical manifestation of generation upon generation of memes. There is nothing revolutionary inside your PC — every last piece of silicon, circuitry, wiring, and metalwork is the embodiment of thousands of years of memetic evolution, from the brain and hands of one skilled crafter to another, to another, to another. Silicon chips didn’t just burst into existence: they are based on millions and perhaps billions of foundational memes, from electricity to microscopy to chemistry. Even seemingly-simple parts of your computer, like its chassis, are the result of metallurgy memes, oil drilling memes (and by extension, exploration memes)… and so on.
The point is, to put it bluntly, computers and machines engage in reckless, lascivious sex, just like living organisms. If you’re on a PC right now, your hand is probably resting on the beautiful offspring of John Logitech’s naked fumbling with Mary Microsoft. If you prefer to keep your hands on your keyboard, your fingers are currently caressing the lovechild of IBM, Underwood, Remington — and a ton of silicon- and plastic-based technologies too, of course.
Much in the same way that dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor, allowing smaller mammals to flourish and humanity’s eventual dominance of this little blue marble we call Earth, computers and machines can be wiped out by a rapid change in the fabric of society. This isn’t to say that memes die, but inorganic machines are slave to humanity — and if we no longer need a machine, it dies. When the light bulb was invented, the candle died — and when the internet was created… well, a whole bunch of meatspace machines and systems died.
What can we learn from Darwinian evolution of computers and machines, then? Well, let’s start by looking at an example of computer evolution, and then follow that line through to today, and then the future. Take Microsoft Windows, for example, which is a brilliant example because many of us have been around long enough to remember its inception in the ’80s, and the vast majority have lived through at least three or four generations. Windows was born from one very, very strong parent — MS-DOS — and the weak-but-not-forgotten PARC Labs WIMP graphical user interface. Through competitive pricing and the dominance of the PC clone, it very quickly killed off most of the competition.
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What followed, for some 30 years, is a perfect case of survival of the fittest. Other options came along — BeOS, PS/2, Linux, and various versions of Mac OS X — but Windows simply picked up the memes that seemed most important — shiny widgets, better networking, more reliable connectivity — and plowed straight through the competition. It is only now, with a hint that the world is now ready tomove on from the PC, that other operating systems like Android, iOS, and OS X are starting to nibble at Windows’ market share. Microsoft will desperately try to splice the latest mobile computing memes into Windows 8 — but if it fails, another OS, a fitter, stronger OS will step into its boots
If the PC era really is drawing to an end, then we may be looking at an extinction event, and an entire ecosystem will surely perish -- except it won’t, because this is memetics, not genetics. No one can say for certain what would rise in the PC’s place, but you can be damn sure that its memes will live on in the heads of project managers, developers, and end users. Even in 200 years, a period so far in the future that Windows and OS X will be phrases that inventors have never even heard of, their memes will live on.
That’s the amazing thing about the evolution of computers and inorganic machines: unless something actually wipes out Earth, our tools will only improve in their efficiency and efficacy. Unless we create a device that’s as intelligent as us, of course, and then we’ll be part of our own extinction event…
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