Complex Adapted Snickers

"The human mind is one of the most complex and intricately adapted systems we know, and our rich and powerful world economy is adapted in great detail to many details of those human minds. I thus expect a strong competitive advantage from new mind systems which can inherit most of that detail wholesale, instead of forcing the wholesale reinvention of substitutes." Robin Hansen

Snickers, Official Candy bar of the Singularity

I cannot sufficiently express this idea better than Mr. Hansen so I will simply riff, off-key and out of tempo on the Rough Beast theme. The idea above is similar to what I term Sexy Beast or the admixture of the made and the born based on existing means. That is, it is not likely that B3aST invents a better Snickers bar. It is less likely that B3aST invents an improved taster of Snickers bars since both Snickers bars and Snickers tasters perform quite adequately today. Why reinvent a Snickers, the most perfect, the most refreshing and the most satisfying of candies?

My proof point is the Snickers High Protein Action-Packed Nutrition System. You can find these next to the Power Bar and Clif Bar and at some distance from the candy aisle. But in a head to head competition, you are better off taking a classic Snickers on a hike. This attempt to circumvent the primacy of the Snickers in the candy pantheon has one pernicious failing -- it does not pack the ready energy of the candy and it costs considerably more.

In like manner, any AI will likely never get around to establishing a trading floor in a hardened bunker under a mountain in Nevada. There may be a server farm there but the main action will be on Wall Street or Broad Street. Like Snickers, it just makes no sense to start all over again since these are organic entities which grew like mushrooms since this is where the humus abides.

The flip side of this argument is that the future has already arrived. The Sexy Beast has emerged in the ecosystem of candy and financial exchanges. We have met her majesty whether we can see this or not.