The Superdark Factory: Toward the Full Automation of Software

I’m really pleased to announce the release of The Superdark Factory: Toward the Full Automation of Software, a paper about the theory and design of self-directed machine entities, published in Antikythera (MIT Press) I’m honoured to be a co-author alongside the Disintegrator team: Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Ty Dunn and Hugh Scott-Douglas. Imagine the most extreme possible factory: a factory that drives itself, a factory that determines its own objectives and optimizes itself to accomplish them. It is something like a fully automated firm, a company with no people inside, a recursively self-optimizing body that decides what to make, how to make it, and why. This is a very special kind of factory, a factory built with the intention of producing something strictly in excess of its creator’s abilities, something so productive, so efficient, and so capable that it exceeds any possibility of its prescription in advance, something that belongs to the set of possible factories that…