alt Hacker NewsI love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).
There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.
Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents
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Our enlightened ideas and their dangerously agitating propaganda (literally a virus).
The framing of something as a disease is itself slightly into the fascist territory.
Yeah I mean if everything is virus that word seems to hold no meaning =) So thats the reality behind language itself. Communication itself really starts to mean everything and nothing simultaneously, at least as a deeper philosophical truth. You can start to poke holes in jsut about everything this way.
Wasn't aware that memes were an accepted part of evolutionary biology. They're not inherited like genes through reproduction that are subject to natural selection via biological fitness. Or any other evolutionary mechanism.
>"We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in."
You can finish reading your friend's favorite book or put it down if you don't like it. Neither are you economically compelled to read it by your workplace or forced to build work on top of it that will become difficult or impossible to modify/maintain if you bin the book.
I get that the title sounds a bit sensational, but there really is something to AI adoption beyond book-sharing.