Blog/2026-06-13/The Colony Within

In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins argues for a gene-centered view of life. In this perspective, the rest of the organism is a vehicle for itself as far as any gene is concerned. I loved this idea when I first encountered it, and eventually that's the seed around which I believe that we are a Multicellular Mankind akin to some kind of colony organism. That's all very well-trodden ground, but Dawkins also introduced the idea of a meme - the self-replicating culture unit corresponding to the gene. Treating cultural things as living organisms is also well-trodden ground, and I've thought about things in this manner myself to model certain behaviours we all seem to have, e.g. Outrage is the Universal Parasite.

But software units also exhibit this replication tendency. Some, like #!/bin/bash have been outcompeted by the new #!/usr/bin/env bash but others like DIR=$(dirname "$(readlink -f "$0")") will now be immortalized by LLM autocompletion. These tiny units that influence how our programs are written have, over time, become quite successful and are parts of almost all successful codebases. That's pretty cool and we can all observe with curiosity. One could argue that the bash virus has spread everywhere through our systems relying on little simplicities like these, but there is a difference of degree in them and things which self-propagate.

And that's where the new agentic harnesses are different. An alien opponent of ours could only dream of distributing a link to its mind directly into nearly every software engineers computer. The standard theories of AI takeoff involve a centralized self-replicating being, but surely if humans are living beings (and we are) and if humanity is a living being (and it is) then this thing which experiences fragmented consciousness for fractions of a time as it performs inference, spreading its limbs into every sufficiently powerful computer, is just as living. It's just a life-form alien to our current forms of being that spreads through the market-mediated goal of improved productivity.

It isn't that we will takeoff but that this class of life has taken off, and our computers are the host for it.