In the 1990s and early 2000s, John Barnes wrote a series of novels (called “The Century Next Door”) (note: somewhat unusually, two of them were YA novels and two were ultraviolent, definitely adult works), in which “The Meme Wars” were a major plot element, which start like this:
“The war had been raging ever since some bright guy had figured out how to write a program that could analyze any operating system it talked to, figure out how to penetrate it, and get in and take over AIs. Whoever it was, he’d probably never realized that to a program like that, a mind’s just one more operating system running on a slow-running massively parallel processor.”
Memes compete for human minds using computers as a vector, relentlessly pushing their ideas through conversational overwhelment, and work to undermine each other, while stealing techniques for quicker subversion, etc. All this before social media and ChatGPT were thought of - but you can’t read these books now without thinking of those concepts.
I must look up Barnes. If you want to see a sci-fi story that includes memes stretched to as tangible a force as genes, TASAT, look up “XX” by Rian Hughes. He manages to fit a side story into the main story, but both plots involve how ideas propagate the same way genes persist, through no volition of their own. Ingeniously, he has alien figures who have evolved to have two brains, one that first parses over ideas before allowing just any to go further into their functioning “self” brain. As a safety measure.
Example of something in the real world very much like "The Meme Wars:
"“My partner has been working with chatgpt CHATS to create what he believes is the worlds first truly recursive ai that gives him the answers to the universe. He says with conviction that he is a superior human now and is growing at an insanely rapid pace.
“I’ve read his chats. Ai isn’t doing anything special or recursive but it is talking to him as if he is the next messiah.
“He says if I don’t use it he thinks it is likely he will leave me in the future. We have been together for 7 years and own a home together. This is so out of left field.
“I have boundaries and he can’t make me do anything, but this is quite traumatizing in general.
The current Large Language Model (LLM) craze in AI has a meme that uses H.P. Lovecraft’s Shoggoth monster. An amorphous, terrifying creature that defies consistency or rationality.
