The Meme Machine

which is incidentally the first chapter in my thesis, right? That approaching the conceptual troublemaker.

And it is a conceptual troublemaker because she had the job of rescuing the meme from this dark pseudo-scientific area, right? Because in the 90s, 1999 is when Blackmore writes her book, The Meme Machine.

Right? Where she's discussing memes in all sorts of strange contexts.

And then people are like, hold on, wait a minute.

You know, it was her book, The Mean Machine, I wanted to talk to her about in the context of second generation AI.

Now, in The Meme Machine, she argues, following Richard Dawkins' idea, that memes or ideas, if you prefer, obviously the word meme has changed since she wrote that book, they're like genes.

So they're subject to natural selection, and therefore they display the same kind of goal-oriented behavior we see in nature.

Namely, they want to be propagated rather than being ignored or forgotten.