The connection between the Hostile AI link and the McKenna quote is this: the informational barrier between humans, institutions and technology is highly permea

The connection between the Hostile AI link and the McKenna quote is this: the informational barrier between humans, institutions and technology is highly permeable, and creates a perfect petri dish for natural selection in informational life (you can model them as "memes", although the analogy to genes isn't a perfect one). Yes, it breeds far less rapidly than a Kurzweilian AGI, and one day we will face that music for better or worse. But what I'm driving at this is that will not come as a singular moment when SkyNet gets the switch flipped; it will be a gradual evolution from the pre-existing emergent intelligence of the "human+institution+technology" informational network. (Even if you had a day where you flipped the switch on an infinitely accelerating AI, that life form would still inherit the legacy data of humans and their institutions, which would inevitably shape its consciousness, infecting it with any memes sticky enough to cross the barrier.) See also: the coming wave of Distributed Autonomous Corporations. http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/01/computer-corporations http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/01/computer-corp... > On the other hand, those sharks are all from the same families. Power is still hereditary. Too true. Just because new evolutionary cycles are happening powerfully at higher layers of abstraction, it doesn't mean the old ones disappear.