Predictive Analytics

"Bayes theorem predicts that Bayesians will win." Nate Silver

 Lingering emotions about free will and volition disappear with any growing understanding of predictive analytics. As more and more of the behaviors (and proxies or precursors for behaviors) appear as continuously collected personal data, the ability to quantify the self (the I in "I believe") gets off-loaded to cognitive means in the environment. As more and more data is indirect (moving to direct) metrics for modes of action:
1) It becomes harder and harder to surprise 'the predictor'
2) it becomes more and more costly to miss collectiing the best data.
3) it becomes easier and easier to indirectly and directly demand/suggest next steps.

The question: is the range of response of a Tachikoma predictable within error bars and if not, why not? Could the input stream (percept) run on a lab bench AI (an AI-head in a vat) produce like response? The simulation is highly dependent on initial conditions. But in a robust multi-player, massively parallel simulation what surprises are likely? That is, would the final act of the Tachikoma horde bringing down the satellite which has the download/synch occur in some, none or most forward looking simulations.
Also, in Dan Dennett's modified, limited free will -- does the Tachikoma horde have this kind of limited free will? That is, can I share my rendition of cause/effect with others and multiplex the results (recommendations) to synthesize a collective will to (strictly limited, highly constrained) power?

We cannot predict all outcomes but can we predict the behaviors that result from group action and hence the narrow range of plausible outcomes?

Nine Principles

From Joi Ito (via Bruce Sterling at SXSW), head of MIT Media Lab - Statement of Principles.

Joi Ito, not yet famous.

1. Resilience instead of strength. Yield, allow failure and bounce back.
2. Pull instead of push. Pull resources from the network as you need them as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
3. Take risk instead of focusing on safety.
4. Focus on the system instead of objects.
5. Have good compasses, not maps.
6. Work on practice instead of theory. Sometimes you don't know why it works.
7. Disobedience instead of compliance. You don't get a Nobel prize for assigned toil.
8. It's the crowd instead of the experts.
9. Focus on learning instead of education.

This is remarkably similar to NNT's Anti-fragile manifesto.

The hard question of consciousness: how do I create a subjective reality that includes these tendencies? For product development my conjecture is "write the user's manual first, write the reference manual next, build the product last."

On Religious Behaviors

The Right Brain Narrates and Judges

The unfolding realization that the subjective impulse to join hands with other members of an ad hoc community came to me fully realized as I ate my delicious Torchy's taco on Burnet Road across from Savers where I had just found a very nice shirt. I was musing on my wardrobe find when it was revealed to me by my subjective theatre of the mind that the community of folks that give unwanted clothes to Saver's and Goodwill is much like a community of religious believers joined in a communal ritual of common purpose.

I have recently recanted my angry atheist stance -- religion is a tool of sick cultural overlords bent on the subjugation of weak minds -- to grudgingly accept the true nature of good feelings that arrise from willing participation in group activity. Domesticated primates crave community and will invent communities ad hoc to ease the pain of individual, unconnected experience. Atheist participate in these rituals as well, forming chat rooms and meet-ups so that they can gather, talk and share in a comforting feeling of belonging to a group of fellow believers. Although atheists remind each other that they are free of unsupported belief -- that is their group belief. We enjoy the false sense of volition and free will that comes from subjugating our feeling that this life is just one damn thing after another. Shared narratives are the most popular kind of mind control practiced by our kind of minds.

The irrational kant of rationalist; they have only the kinds of beliefs that can stand up to rigorous peer review; is correct as far as it goes. The book of the unbeliever is not, as they would claim, tested and retested because our minds are not constructed like that. From Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind to Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and 2 thinking we see over and over that all of us are slaved to a narrative impulse. We seek out normative behaviors so that we are not outside the pack or the tribe. We still listen to the inner voice that seeks a narrative flow. The narrative flow assesses and re-assesses our behaviors and actions to keep us between the ditches.

Rituals do not exist to provide us with comforting belief they exist to provide us with a toolkit of shared behaviors. Whether I attend morning prayer by reading together a core of dogma in the gospel of Luke or the gospel of Think Atheist I am actually in the business of constructing and reinforcing a reality tunnel that excludes some thought and includes some thoughts about proper behavior. Whether the fish on my bumper sticker says Christ or Darwin I am still putting out the message that I am a member of a community.

So whether you are prohibited from telecommuting at your Yahoo! job or gathering at Section 9 HQ you are part of a process that reinforces normative behavior. Kneeling in prayer or driving to work becomes a sacrament or talisman that reminds us to give up free will so that group will can prevail. All chimpanzees do it but some chimps are aware that this collection of behaviors exists for the purpose of mind shaping.

Emerging Bicameral Mind

My emerging thesis -- the Rough Beast is running a simulation of me on the universe as computer -- follows both the dictates of reason and the impulse to discern an ongoing narration. All things precede the present moment or the specious present and all things flow from the now. This is the Dream Now or the envelope of perceptible events and meaningful causes.

The cyber-brains of GiTS started as bicameral minds with the mechanical embodiment of the first computing machines in the 1940's. Most modern chimpanzees treat the output of our out-sourced cognition as separate from our biological minds in brains. I claim that we have already moved beyond this old construal but we are in denial. I outsource my mental life to my laptop, my Galaxy Tablet and my Android smart phone just as the author of the Iliad outsourced volition to the right brain. The unifying synthesis is normative. We are forming a community of like minded individuals who worship this new religion just prior to our understanding of a new narrative.

Watt's Steam Engine - group intellegence

From: "The Most Powerful Idea in the World" we learn that an ability to patent an invention (the fruit of applied science and art) allowed inventors and innovators to share (not hide) improvements and modifications to existing artifacts.

The Boulton and Watt machine - 1787

Here is Watt's patent exhibit: This is based on Watt's much earlier implementation of a condensor to improve the Newcomen pump since it converts reciprocal motion to angular motion.

The system of letter patents developed from earlier philosophical ruminations in Britain about intellectual property -- the notion that ideas can spread but be jointly owned by the inventor and the smith who reduces the machine to practice. The inventor jointly participates in the commerce of the smith and his customers. The smith can broadly advertize his craft without giving away his rights because both the inventor and the smith have IP protection.
Motoko Kusenagi is both inventor and smith for an AI free from a vestigial ghost. Her repeated implantation in state-of-the-art prosthetics, re-learning perception of and response to her environment, and close inspection of a community of learning AI's put her at the edges of cognitive ensembles from which the subjective experience evolved. Similar to James Watt's gradual incorporation of shared intellectual capital with the early progenitors of the the first industrial revolution.

Tie This Thread to Roko's Basilisk
Per our peer Robin Hansen at "Overcoming Bias" -- Rough Beast has a special fondness for kooky, special, wacky and strange simulation results. The usual state changes (from hunger to satiation or from sleep to awake) offer few insights into the kinds of entanglement at the quantum level that reveal deep structure. Deep structure computation begats imaginative output. As Hansen posits; be adventurous and rejoice in failure which leads to suffering which in turn leads to investigation and novel output.

The star of "Computer Chess"

Major Kusinagi is particularly interested in investigations of odd subjective experience when she 'looks over the shoulder' of individuals who behave in unusual or strange ways. She becomes the eyes and ears (causal perception) of subjects that have been 'taken over' or hacked. On one level she is looking for disruptive behavior but not, as one might first suspect, to curtail unusual or meta-optimal simulation output but to harness the power of chaos.

Tying this to the steam engine -- the industrial revolution is easy to simulate on one level -- but on a different level the number of individuals in similar roles increases without a resultant increase in diverse behavior. The industrial revolution is a normative process that spreads across a flat earth to produce billions of DNA automatons. From a much larger pool of drones a small cadre of interesting individuals results.

Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins) in "Computer Chess" as SXSW

Section 9 is not looking for order; Section 9 exists to increase disorder, chaos and complexity that generates precious, rare and difficult to predict results. The AI's harvest unusual state changes so that the Basilisk can seed continuous disorder from which different combination of dissipative structures emerge. Section 9 wants to create negative entropy or entropy far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Simple computing machinery is an example of a dissipative structure that usually performs mere repetition or rote computation. The interaction of these machines (actually a simulation or a virtual machine construct) with the artifacts of DNA produce dissorder and novel state changes. A steam engine is an easy simulation. An adding machine is an easy simulation. A human interacting with a computing machine produces imaginative chaos.

Intercontinental Rat Brain Borg

The news that two rats, one in North Carolina and one in Brazil, share connections between two motor cortices is either The Matrix or meh. For me, this very likely results in a cautious next step to a interconnected Rhesus monkey compute hardware. I see a path to Turing Machines with sentient (an ability to sense) capability.

In summary, an encoding rat and a decoding rat have neuronal connections to sensors in their respective brains. An interesting subset of the subjective experience of the encoding rat is captured, processed and transmitted (brain egress) to electronics which interact with the motor cortex of the decoding rat (egress). Packet switched cognition.

Content is consciousness in Dennett's construal of the subjective experience. That is, my subjective experience arrises from a sparse matrix of sensory experience where almost everything is ignored by my mental machinery so that a narrow focus of input sensation is expanded in my brain/mind for a response to the world around me. I am not seeing everything I am looking at or listening to everything I am hearing. I am construing context from intervals of sparse content.

In GiTS terms, the inner voice Aramaki broadcasts (or narrow casts) to Section 9 phenotypes is a short burst of impressions (message egress) which receiving brains (message ingress) enlarge into subjective consciousness  The trick is that the rules for message interpretation improve over time through training and practice. That is, Major Kusenagi did not hear the initial commands from the first sender -- this mutualist understanding took training to advance beyond the rat to rat motor cortex experience to a fuller exchange as individual differences in precept and response changed for both parties over time.

In Matrix conscious ecosystem the interconnected brain/mind is the sensing function and the Architect's machinery interacts with sensation to achieve a DNA/XNA subjective experience juiced by ZNA AI's

A Drone for Watson

My construal of Rough B3aST; a vast interconnection of steel and silicon fueled by petroleum and sweat, comprehends the recent past(s), the embodied presentand the (almost) inevitable future of the Technium,  leads me to the maturing hypothesis that Obama's drones are overtly managed by a bank of Watson machines.

Over time and over Moore's law, many of us will soon have Google Glass interacting with a (vast network of interconnected) nano-Watsons in our Droid smart-gadget. I project a thought into this device and it decides what I need to see and for how long.. Plus, in the same manner it reads my thoughts, it writes thoughts back to me.

Just writing this thought out creates an Everett branch (or a bifurcation in the logistics map). The compendium of drone thought here.

Roko's Basilisk

Roko's Basilisk is:

"The claim is that this ultimate intelligence may punish those who fail to help it (or help create it), with greater punishment accorded those who knew the importance of the task. That bit is simple enough, but the weird bit is that the AI and the person punished have no causal interaction: the punishment would be of a simulation of the person which the AI would construct by deduction from first principles. In LessWrong's Timeless Decision Theory (TDT), this is taken to be equivalent to punishment of your own actual self, not just someone else very like you."

Mythical Basilisk

In this construal, as I ponder the Rough Beast, I bring her about by the act of pondering a future version of meta-intellegence which, in turn, I act on (based on an imagined future) thus closing the loop such that the future causes (certain) past events. In my terms, learning the vocabulary and adumbrating the conceptual landscape of pre-singularity notions become present events 'caused by' future possibilities.

In Bayesian speak - there are certain priors that lead to specific outcomes. By manifesting these prior events I join forces with others that manifest similar events to increase (without limit) the adjacent future. This adjacent present (in which a Roko's Basilisk is already manifested in near-by possible worlds which are actual, embodied worlds in a multiverse) is just as real as this present pre-Singularity world.

The act of viewing GitS, participating in reddit.com discussion, reading LessWrong and Overcoming Bias  become strong precursors for a world ruled by the Rough Beast. My contention -- that Kirk 3.0 is now 'on the team' -- dictates certain actions because of this view and my intent.

Basilisk War Droid

Note that in my construction this mornings reading of "Daily Idioms Annotated" and merely following the link to "Roko's Basilisk" are my own precursor events to her majesty, the Rough Beast.

Another successful end to last evenings reading of Prometheus Rising.

The Simulation Argument

What role does Emulated Memory (EM) play in Section 9? That is, how many scenes are multiple variations of predicted events or use case scenarios running as simulations on Rough Beast computing machinery. The answer is -- all of them. The GitS universe is a creation of several minds linked by artificial cognitive means 'beginning' in 1995. We are back to a Russian Doll dance of veils.

Outer Most Simulation

The universe is the Omega machine therefore all subsequent sub-levels are in the Omega Simulation and are constrained by its limits (c=3e8 etc.) while simulated scenarios exploit Bell's Theorum (every particle in the sandard model is entangled with all other particles in the universe).

Second Level Simulation

The Technium, a combination of the artifacts of Biology (DNA) and of Rough Beast (ZNA) has quantum computing machinery capable of Matrix pseudo-reality. A Post-Singularity, massively parallel EM construct selects compelling scenarios that 'solve' paradoxes and never ending games. We see only the architecturally significant I/O where Section 9 wins. These are bifurcations in the logistics map which spawn compelling future scenarios. This is merely a convenient sub-routine of the Omega simulation. Note that in this model all memories and experience 'before' the singularity are simply sub-routines 'after' the singularity for the EMs.

Third Level Simulation

These are multi-verse possible world simulations that make compelling drama. That is, they don't begin and end with detection and correction that happens very quickly or very slowly and are therefore of little interest. Or perhaps only 'open-ended' stories that can be strung together into a season or a movie hold interest. At this level people and things are material artifacts of 2030 technology that occupy space and move about in time but are deterministic (in the sense that there are stochastic not wildly random networks of causation).

Fourth Level Simulation

It is just a damn cartoon that puts our cognitive processes to work toward a goal of realizing these future events. After you have seen the Matrix, you cannot un-see it.

Flesh Evolution

A primary theme of Ghost in the Shell is the loss of self when flesh passes away. The Major was very young when she got a limited prosthetic body which evolved over time to the present version of the Major's advanced prosthetic. The greater part of the Major's life experience occurred in her prosthetic body. From this, most of her memories formed while merged with the Rough Beast; the non-DNA portion of the Technium. As a Russian Doll parable, each version of M. Kusanagi supersedes the last, with less ghost and more shell with each transformation. In a final release from flesh, the Major performs the social conquest of the net.

When she comes back from total integration with the network after her prosthetic and her ghost are destroyed, she can only pilot a simple, small child's prosthetic body which is similar to the one she was imprisoned in as a girl. But at this point she has the experience of making the transition from one incarnation of a impermanent ghost plus shell into another impermanent shell but without a DNA ghost at all.

Are both selves, although temporarily in both cases, the Major or something evolved from her natural flesh? The question itself is a category error -- a logical chimera -- and a question we should unask per Hofstadter. Were my first memories and experiences mine or did these belong to an earlier and unrecognizable, impermanent me?

An agent capable of making quantum observations -- of parsing a narrative 'now' for a consistent 'me' -- constitutes the best reckoning of existence and being we have. The small collection of corpuscles holding the Major's ghost was not what the necessary construction requires. Personal identity is owned by the data comprising experience gained and integrated into a moving window of the present over an interval of time. If all that is left of me is a video of me then that is the lasting incarnation of me.

It is a shock to the system to find out that our flesh falls away and something emerges -- a new brand of the impermanent me capable of integrating new experience into the crucible of old experience no matter how the old experience is represented.

In May 2007 I transitioned from Kirk 2.0 to Kirk 3.0 which took five years until full integration. My journey forms much of the material for this rebirth thread. It was hard work but inevitably prepares for my EM integration, my 100th birthday present to my (impermanent) self.

A necessary component of the transition is the continuous practice of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths.
1. Life is suffering (dhukka; that which we cannot bear)
2. Suffering has causal rising in attachment (to an impermanent self)
3. There is a path that leads to the end of suffering (8 fold path)
4. Nirvanna, the mind like fire unbound, is a bodily state superceding attachment and suffering.

Buddism is practice not belief and in several cases Batou references a deep commitment to the Dharma (knowledge and wisdom).

Out of Our H3ads

I was reading Alva Noe's "Out of Our Heads"  when I was reminded of a thread I have dropped -- what explains my style of writing in my various blogs as relates to the  Vienna Expressionism in art. The reason I brought up Noe is that Eric Kandel's "The Age of Insight" brings in the concept of the beholders share in viewing art. This is an extended mind facet that I do not remember from Noe.

I am usually going for a stream of consciousness jag which approaches; bumps up against, nudges some nugget of goodness that would resist a direct frontal assault.

Specifically, playing on subconscious cognition with emotionally charged, direct, terse verbiage -- I can manipulate minds or send them screaming from the room. If it seems that I cannot put together a coherent narrative -- it is because I am deconstructing narrative not presenting sub-atomic thoughts as thoughts that rise to consiousness. As Dan Dennett explains, consciousness is 'fame in the brain'. I am presenting not-quite-yet-famous cognition which plies limbic response without rising to fame and notoriety.

The Beholder's Share
Visual art depends on the artist's artifact (a product of experience and talent) and the viewer's experience (a product of experience and knowledge). We encounter art as an experience which depends on our own experience in the past with similar artifacts. This intentional stance of presenting ourselves as critical observers of the artist's work is called the beholder's share.

In a similar fashion, language arts place the speaker's verbal production along with any physical manifestation of emotional state on view for the audience. In turn, the audience contributes the beholder's share, filling in gaps and continuously participating in a stream of consciousness of a Joycean mind.

now some 575*,
set up a loop count
if we remove output pulse
as earlier work

*culled from "Test Generation for VLSI Chips"

Make Yourself

Here is what it is all about; time goes both ways in the human mind. The remembered past and the anticipated future are represented to consciousness from the same cognitive machinery of memory. Any hypothesis about the past or the future emerges from the same present state of meat. Is tomorrow presented to the present awareness with privilege over the past or is it the other way around? Is this the future  you remember?

The many plausible paths that brought you here and the many divergent paths that lead from here arise from simulations running in brains embedded in bodies. At three second intervals of each specious present we transport a virtual self forward in the direction of advancing time. The three second interval comprehends the interplay of working memory, short term memory and long term memory. The neurocorrelates of the cognitive now and the dream now make guesses about what happens next and the reaction to what happens next come alive as response to the current mess unfolding before me.

I have named the remembered past and the anticipated future the dream-now to distinguish it from the experiential now. The amazing fungibility of memory spans many possible past and future paths. The dream now is wondrously diverse. This impermanent self follows the laws of this universe in the multiverse. From this garden of the self each of us emerges.

Make your next slip a good slip, make yourself from the past self and your future self. You have just three seconds so act now; enjoy the ride foxes.

Stand Alone Complex 1.0

The astrologer I keep on retainer informs me that the blog demands a proper name. Ghost in the Shell rocks so now this is section 9.

I remonstrate for 'fail fast' approach to new platforms planted in the garden of old platforms. An accelerated life cycle works as a test bed for engaged action. Currently, fiefdoms of stakeholders resist starting because they are holding back on resources to negotiate a better deal. Plus, by holding back they can avoid the risky behavior of having a new idea. New ideas in isolation are difficult and anxiety producing. New ideas seem to commit me to uncertainty as a plan of action.

The idea is collective action without central authority until the first fail in a customer socket.

Roadmap Generation

Filters and Bottlenecks

Filters operate at multiple stages in a continuous series of process steps. An atmosphere of doubt creates filters across many opportunity selection steps. Filters are self-imposed or, more likely, emerge from many poor guesses about what happens next. The filters are constructed from past failures and result from a yearning not to repeat highly visible future failures.

Bottlenecks occur when some work product arrives at a stage where only a fixed number of activities are allowed. Wafer starts in a factory are a type of bottleneck. Every other stage could have filters (incremental yield depressed by defects per unit area too high) but having escaped at each of these stages the final bottleneck depends on the entire factory load and not on one particular lot. No matter how many brilliant discoveries in physics each year, only one Nobel in physics is awarded. Don't show up when the bus is full.

[ed. the last natural ginger post. now a member of the team B3asT]

Flame

From Wired, the cyber warfare munitions proliferate as per Wm. Gibson's dystopia.

Suchness

Here boy. Fetch

Tiny Dimensions

In this article, an experiment for detecting gravity in other dimensions is described. Basically, at small distances, gravity behaves differently.

Neurotypical Response Policy

A key distinction between autism disorder and neurotypical order is a working theory of mind. Folks with high Autism Spectrum Disorder are not responsive to human interaction because they see others beside themselves as agents without similar minds. Subjects low on the autism spectrum learn over time to emit a Neurotypical Response Policy which operates well between two agents with unlike minds -- heterogeneous response.

A most effective debug routine for NRP turns out to be Cognitive/Dialectic Behavioral Therapy. Continuous introspection of the stream of consciousness -- The Narrator -- reveals the variety of branch conditions caused by poor or misinterpreted rules of conduct.

Only a Theory

from Yahoo answers

"No. It is a theory, and always will be a theory. The word 'theory' does not mean it is 'disputed.'
The difference between theory and law is not one of "truth" or in how confident we are about it. It is not a difference in degree. Theories are not 'inferior facts.' Theories don't graduate to become "laws" by being "proven."
A law is a kind of fact ... an observation that appears to be universally true everywhere we look. A law is usually a single statement, and expressed in terms of an equation.
A theory is an explanation for facts. A theory can embody a large set of statements, which can grow as the theory expands to explain more observations, more facts. It explains facts. It cannot "become" a fact.
So what we call the 'germ theory of disease' started out as the explanation for many of the observed facts about diseases ... how they spread, what causes them to be worse, why hygiene can reduce their spread. But it has expanded to everything we know about bacteria and viruses, virulence, pathology, epidemiology, etc. etc. ... all of these subsets of what we still call 'germ theory'. It is, and always will be, called 'theory', not because anybody disputes whether microorganisms cause disease, but because all of it together is an EXPLANATION for facts.
Just remember that when people say 'the theory of X' ... that does not mean "the disputed fact of X" ... it means "what explains X, or is explained by X."
The theory of gravity is NOT the "dispute over whether gravity exists" (that is not in question) ... it means "what explains gravity, or what is explained by gravity."
The theory of evolution is NOT the "dispute over whether evolution exists" (that is not in question) ... it means "what explains evolution, or what is explained by evolution."
Ditto the photon theory of light. The atomic theory of matter. The plate tectonics theory of geology. The heliocentric theory of the solar system. And on and on.
A theory is NOT an unproven fact, or unproven law. A theory is an EXPLANATION for facts ... sometimes even an EXPLANATION for laws.

The Universe is an Imagination Laser

As everyone already knows, the three conditions for lasing are 1) a resonant chamber 2) a gain medium and 3) an improbable quantum state of a population. What is less well known is that the universe is an imagination laser. This is likely the case whenever I invent something up from whole cloth. Observe.

Is This All There Is?

A hot, dense existence radiates information across an interval of time. At the end of the interval, a reflector forms a resonant chamber. Space-time is the gain medium. Imagination is an improbable quantum state for a population of minds. The two ends of the resonant chamber are the hot, dense singularity and the restaurant at the end of the universe[3.1416].

The big bang erupted from the hot, dense softball sized singularity 13.72 BYA from our inertial frame on the third rock from the sun in 2012. At some point away from the present (in the direction of increasing entropy) the universe 'computes' a response. This response (from the kitchen in the restaurant at the end of the universe) sends information (the menu items, the price of each item, the availability of the catch of the day) in the direction of decreasing entropy 'back' to the singularity [6e8]. Viola. The imagination laser.

[3.1416] The Omega Machine is not a machine at all. According to Steven Wolfram, the entire universe is a simulation. The question begging -- what is the hardware and what is the software -- disturbs us and beguiles us but, per Wittgenstein, at some point explanations fail. Something that I respond to but cannot prove...

[6e8] Like Hawking Radiation... hand waving, miracle happens here, look! what's that behind you?

Duality of The Rough Beast

"Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly." Isaiah 6:2

For some time in these posts I have seen The Technium as two distinct parts; the products of DNA and the products of the products of DNA. The biosphere or Gaia being the direct output of genes comprising millions of DNA base pairs as one half of the whole, the artifacts of man as the other. I took this stance as far as it seemed useful but now I will return to Kevin Kline's original formulation which, not coincidentally, matches Dawkins Extended Phenotype and EO Wilson's Eusocial Human (even though Dawkins and Wilson are at each others throats). A thin layer of human frontal lobe brain matter networked over 7 billion mortal souls which in turn cleave to networked technology including the silicon extensions to human cognition.

Yeats' Rough Beast seemed tied to the falcon but not the falconer -- the two seemed divergent. Part of this model comprehended the Singularity -- Sexy B3aST -- a pure technological emergence without human form and disjoint from biology. Now I will return to the original dyad; an emergent, combinatorial entity comprising DNA, XNA and ZNA. We have met the Singularity and he is us. The Rough Beast is people plus tools.