Generic Code & Genetic Algorithms
Are we building Skynet without knowing it…
Many of you I am sure have watched the T2 movie in which Sarah Conner describes how “Skynet became self-aware on the 29th August 1997 having had humans are taken out of the loop a few weeks earlier”, an event in the movie that was the beginning of the end for the human race.” Skynet no doubt would have been using generic algorithms and perhaps genetic code too.
You see both of these, generic code & algorithms involve computers writing their own code in effect. Which if you wanted to become self-aware is exactly what you would need to be doing. Of course in 1991 when this movie came out neither existed it was science fiction— but they both do today in 2021, some thirty years later, now it is a science fact.
Generic Code
Generic Code/Types are not that popular in Swift yet, not popular perhaps because most if not all programmers have the concept of typing hardcoded into their psyche. Conversely, the only languages that don’t use typing are not taken seriously at all, languages like BASIC. But generic coding is, in no shape or form going back to BASIC, no — generic coding is a higher-level concept alltogether — it still uses typing, just not the way you’re used to.
