Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene
I was reading it with my son nearby. He’s 14, so not the “bedtime stories” stage. More the “half-listening while scrolling Shorts” stage.
Which, honestly, grudgingly, felt fitting… because Dawkins has this idea about 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗲𝘀. Not memes as in what my son consumes in 15-second bursts.
Dawkins meant memes as cultural replicators: ideas ...habits ...values...behaviours. The stuff that spreads because it’s catchy, convenient, or comforting. The stuff that quietly shapes us as a society and a culture and lots more besides...
And it made me think about what I’m actually trying to pass on.
Not my eye colour... not my stubbon obsession with perfection ... not my unrecognisable accent ... 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝘀𝘀.
• How to treat people when it would be easier not to • How to disagree without dehumanising • How to hold power with care • How to say “I was wrong” and mean it
That inheritance doesn’t travel through DNA. It travels through repeated patterns.
Which brings me to AI which in a very real sense is becoming a 𝗺𝗲𝗺𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗲 - It learns what we reward, repeats what works, and scales it.
That can be brilliant but can also be… a tiny bit alarming. Because if we can’t code ethics into our genes, we can choose what gets encoded into our systems: the defaults we set ....the behaviours we optimise for ....the boundaries we refuse to cross ... the way we simply communicate with these LLMs even ...
The reality is simple and ours to choose - A moral compass can’t be neatly codified into biology. Nature doesn’t really do “ought”. It does “what works”.
But we might actually be able to codify some of our best cultural memes into the patterns AI replicates. So maybe the question isn’t “What can AI do?”
Maybe it’s 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝘀𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝗿: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼 𝘄𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗽𝘆? And what do we truly care about passing on as the future decision making thinking framework for these platforms...
Because our kids won’t just inherit our genes. They’ll inherit our systems.
(Sharing this with a 'Then-and-now' of me and my son and the book in question… because it’s hard to think about the future as theory when it’s sitting right next to you, scrolling 💓)