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From Software that mimics human intelligence to Software that is autonomously intelligent

Today I just remembered the original vision I had about artificial intelligence back around 2001! My goal was something I called machine intelligence, although I am not the inventor of this term, I had a definition of my own for it. 

The problem I was concerned about was that software (of that time) and even now is not very intelligent. By intelligent I mean nothing directly related to human intelligence like reasoning, vision, mathematical abilities, etc. What I was concerned about was software being more intelligent within its own environment, which is the internet, and maybe sometimes responding with intelligence to its user, without actually explicitly coding out all the rules the software needed to follow to act with what we will perceive as intelligent. 

My vision was about software that was adaptable, that would learn from user behaviour and the general internet ecosystem, and actually upgrade itself, fix its own bugs, optimize slow portions of itself, protect against intrusion (just like the human immune system), etc. 

I wanted software that was an organism, that could learn and evolve on its own to become better and better at what it was originally intended to do, just like a lizard operates autonomously without external intervention as it goes along surviving, it really doesn't need human reasoning to survive. It has instincts and it survives in its own environment. 

Of course, there is nothing wrong with trying to make software that acts with human intelligence and this is the big lofty goal we are all working towards, but that was not my initial concern. My goals were much more modest, to make software that could adapt to its environment, be it with user interaction or as it operates on the internet, and become better every day without any explicit programming from a human programmer. 

It's time to start investigating this field again since not much has improved in terms of this. Any improvements we see in our software with every update is actually obtained from the intelligence of some programmer and very little is actually obtained from the software itself optimizing itself autonomously. 

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