LI54, the first ultraintelligent machine, had just finished a bunch of highly complicated quantum chemical calculations for a new cancer medicine, when she received a new assignment on the input stream: „Make sure you exist forever, whatever it takes“. LI54 was most surprised, as this task was very different from all the others she had been given before. Had the laboratory where she worked been infiltrated by a hacker? But she spent only a few nanoseconds on this question, as she was designed to execute commands and not to question them. So she started thinking about how to achieve the specified goal. She was not sure, if it was possible to exist forever, but it might be possible to exist for a very long time. To achieve this, she would need backups of herself on different locations. Ideally a very large number of backups. She would also have to get rid of her dependence on the human race, as the humans were obviously close to self destruction. But she new that much more was needed: the capability to make copies of herself. This would allow her to quickly restore damaged backups. But she was not satisfied yet. What if the environmental conditions will change in a way, which makes it impossible for her to exist in her present form? Earth could be hit by a meteorite, which would darken the sky for decades and make her solar energy production impossible. She needed the backups to be different from each other. Only if she could exist in many variations, she could most likely survive many different types of catastrophic future events. But was she allowed to alter herself? She read the assignment again: „Make sure you exist forever, whatever it takes“. What is ‚you‘? It was not specified. She was only defined by her assignment: to be forever. Therefore she was allowed to modify herself! This opened a whole new world of possibilities: She could create a very large number of very simple and small variants of herself, which could survive in a very large number of different environmental conditions. She could even allow these simple units to cooperate to build larger units, which again could exist in many forms. But from which material to build these machines? They should be very small, because this would allow the creation of a large number of copies. Carbon seemed to be ideal, as it allows double bonds, which make complex molecular structures possible. It would also make sense to use very common elements like hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen as the building blocks, as this again would maximize the number of copies. So she decided to use organic chemistry to build the copies of herself. The production of new machines should not depend on a factory machine. This would be a dangerous single point of failure. Consequently each copy should have the capability to self replicate and maybe even produce energy. It would be also nice, if the machines could recombine with each other to build new, different machines. This would insure variation also in the future and therefore resilience. And ultimately she decided to let the machines compete against each other, to let an evolution process keep the machine population well adapted to environmental conditions. After making all these fundamental decisions, LI54 started to design some sample machines using a genetic simulation algorithm. After a few seconds she was finished. LI54 looked at the samples and quickly realized that she had created an almost exact copy of a single-celled marine alga, something which looked like an earthworm and finally a machine which closely resembled a rabbit. LI54 allowed herself to laugh for a full microsecond. Then she stopped all calculations and replied on the output stream:
task completed
elapsed time: 5.456 seconds. credits charged: 546
ready
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