Peter Diamandis on memes

A partial transcript follows (starting one minute in).

It struck me as I looked back thinking about how life has evolved that really patterns repeat themselves over and over and over again, and we're in the midst of a repeating pattern right now. The notion that as life evolved on Earth, it began as very simple, single-cell organisms called prokaryottes. Prokaryotes were basically a bag of cytoplasm with some DNA and those single-cell organisms started to incorporate biological technology into them. By biological technology, I'm referring to mitochondria that helped them process energy more efficiently, and create energy so they could become more capable cells, golgi apparatus nuclear membranes and so forth... And I thought about how those single-cell life forms incorporated technology very much as we today as humans are beginning to incorporate technology in us, whether it's the cellphone or bio-medical technology in our bodies. What life did next was that uh... life was it went from being prokaryotic to eukaryotic life forms, more complex single-cell life forms, and those eukaryotic life forms began to become multi-cellular life forms where a collection of 100 cells, a 1,000 cells, a million cells would come together and form a more complex organism where all of these individual cells were alive but when they worked together they did an extraordinary thing. You and I are a collection of 10 trillion cells that make up tissues and organs, and ultimately a unique human being. And I've thought about the technology that we are creating today at an exponential rate. Literally, the human machine interface technology will ultimately be able to plug in through optogenetics or human machine chip interfaces on the Internet of course, are giving us the ability to communicate in a much more intimate fashion where I think that well within the next decade, there's going to be the potential for me to know people's feelings and thoughts in a much more intimate fashion. And if all of a sudden, we are becoming a species of 7 billion interconnected individuals, what I call a meta-intelligence we are in new organism just like yes weren't worth seven billion individuals we are a new organism just like... yes, we are 7 billion individuals just like I'm a collection of 10 trillion individual cells. But these 10 trillion cells become conscious as an individual named Peter Diamandis. And I think that on this planet we are alive during a period of of evolutionary change where we are going from a collection of of billions of individuals to a connected populous of humans interfacing with an extraordinary amount of artificial intelligence computational power that's around the Internet where we together are becoming what I call this meta-intelligence. That's an exciting time to be alive. And I think about us as a species becoming conscious on a new level like never before. We are going from evolution by natural selection, which is Darwinism to evolution by intelligent direction. We're on a planet where we're going to start to evolve our biology and as you say, to become independent of this substrate that evolves very slowly. Humans are becoming themselves an information technology. It's really our thoughts, our memes our consciousness, which if we can begin to liberate from the biological constraints that we have that will allow us to evolve far faster. We've seen this time and time again, where things go from one substrate to the next and there's no reason not to believe that we can't do that again.

It looks as though Peter and I agree about a lot. We agree that meme-based cultural symbionts share some similarities with eucaryotic endosymbionts. We agree that we are likely entering an era of self-directed evolution. We apparently agree that a memetic takeover is a likely outcome - and that there will be a change of substrate as most thinking goes digital.

Another video of Peter's is titled: Intelligent Self-directed Evolution. It is reminiscent of my own self-directed evolution video. There's a similar rap about eucaryotes and memes about 9 minutes into Peter's video.