People are asking whether AI systems will be able to design themselves by next year. Will that be The Singularity? Should we head for the bunkers?
No. Programs have been writing other programs since 1960. Creating a function to do a job, running the function, then deleting it from memory. Object-oriented programming like C++ is based on this idea. The stable part of the program is just the templates or genes. Most of the action happens in cells (virtual functions) spawned by the genes for a brief moment then discarded.
The content you see on the web was partly made by programs creating programs. Each web platform has a solid base, a constant page that doesn’t change and generally doesn’t get displayed. The constant page calls Javascript routines to write new pages “just for you”, generally including newly written Javascript routines to perform functions like asking “personalized” questions or filling out “personalized” order forms.
Pre-digital physical machines could have built new machines to perform functions. The trouble was on the discarding end. A newly molded input knob doesn’t just disappear, it has to be disassembled and melted down. Instead, some machines create virtual functions in air or fluid or electric current, a self-sustaining vortex or resonance that pulls in an input, tosses dust out of the chimney, or trips a valve.
Polistra's Mill 