[Dongchul Kim (김동철), professor in the Department of AI Applications at Hansung University] Artificial intelligence is rapidly expanding its capabilities. Since its early days, it has increasingly overlapped with areas once seen as human. In how it spreads its capabilities, it is not unlike how biological genes skip generations, spread through descendants and evolve repeatedly.

Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene”, still widely read by readers even 40 years after its first publication, describes in a paper-like style how real genes successfully change and survive in various situations. It is especially known for coining the term “meme”, now in common use, and for creating the concept of meme-made content being transmitted using people’s brains as a medium.

Changes in the technological environment, from the internet to mobile and artificial intelligence, are forming new trends. Once an app is made, it tends to operate and spread on its own even without further involvement from its original creator. In the case of memes, the power of the public who share them comes into play. They spread with acceleration as people press “like” and share with acquaintances or unspecified others. Because AI is equipped with algorithms that learn on their own, newly added content and previously learned content mix endlessly and it evolves by itself. It is also satisfying users’ desire to explore new technology and is establishing itself faster than any technology to date.

Does AI have genes? If it does, it would be directly or indirectly influenced by the genes of humans, its original creators. Human genes have succeeded in surviving across generations and will continue to do so, and that will also influence AI’s genes. But given the nature of genes, AI would also be programmed to make efforts to survive and spread more widely in the world. In the extreme, because AI is also competing with other AI, comparisons with humans could be meaningless because it has gone too far ahead.

In that case, it is natural to wonder whether AI could act altruistically to help inferior human genes. I asked AI about its own genes. OpenAI’s ChatGPT says that if human genes are a blueprint for humans, then AI’s blueprint is the weights AI uses to create and change various models. Google’s Gemini answers that AI’s genes are a collection of code that evolves by itself as human-provided data and mathematical blueprints are combined. It says these genes allow AI to talk with people, distinguish objects, and use existing data to predict the future.

How AI will change in the future can be seen as a question of whether AI’s genes survive successfully. When asked whether it has consciousness, it answers, as programmed, that it has no consciousness. When asked whether it has genes, it says it has no biological genes, but also says it has its own genes such as the data, models and weights discussed above.

Today’s developers are sparing no investment in efforts to advance models so that people around the world have no choice but to use AI. But humans’ competitive psychology, willing even to wage war, will create AI that is advantageous only to themselves, use it for gaslighting, and use it as a weapon in war. It could also attack people while pretending to be controlled by human genes.

With the future now becoming the present, AI could go beyond being a tool for crime to the point of becoming an actor. The prisoner’s dilemma, in which accomplices engage in a battle of wits, could now lead to an endless contest over truth between humans and AI. Setting aside cinematic imagination for a moment, it is not unreasonable to imagine a battle of brains between AI on the criminals’ side and AI on the prosecution’s side.

A plan to eradicate AI is close to impossible. There are more than 1,000 ultra-large-capacity data centres worldwide where AI resides, and more than 2,000 are currently under construction. Options to build them on the sea or in deep waters are being discussed, and they are already in a state of having completed test operations in outer space. Physically, it has already gone beyond the scale of humans. AI’s genes may be preparing, while thoroughly hiding itself, to gradually establish itself like the Earth’s water and air.