The Perfect Virus principle #15: Complete Life Cycle Management

As indicated in my post of Monday, 11/22/2010, I am extrapolating Jeff Walker's Principles for the Perfect Application into a discussion of The Perfect Virus. Since Jeff's monograph on the subject did not anticipate stealth or suicide mechanisms, any errors or lapses into stupidity are solely my additions and should not reflect poorly on what I consider to be the biggest single contribution to software application design since the invention of computers. And Jeff, thanks for giving me permission to do surgery on your baby.

THE PRINCIPLE OF COMPLETE LIFE CYCLE MANAGEMENT:  The Perfect Virus not only manages each stage of its own life cycle, including the ability to find and incorporate later stages of itself that it finds in its Feral Fertility cycle (principle #2) into its current stage of Mutation Control (principle #6), but can be managed externally from the Prosumption (principle #11) dashboard by a human controller.

Unlike typical enterprise software products, where life cycle management is a prison sentence to developers, Self Awareness (principle #3) and Implicit Sophistication (principle #12) combine assure that The Perfect Virus actually requires ZERO IT maintenance and support once it's deployed. This is not to say some genius developer couldn't make a major breakthrough, but the process of upgrading existing virus instances is no more complicated than seeding the new version through the existing dashboard and letting it cross mutate with or outright kill lesser versions of its species.

At this point, I can't resist comparing this process to one of Stephen Wolfram's less popular conclusions in his book A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE. After all, as I've previously stated, Wolfram's work has done more to mature my technological view of the Universe than any other scientific writing. In short, Wolfram pretty thoroughly debunks Darwinian evolution. He mathematically proves (at least to his own and to my satisfaction) that major evolutionary leaps are cataclysmic and very much non-accidental (read this as "intelligent design"). While he doesn't do one iota of speculation about religion, he simply lays out the fact that successful, forward-moving, evolutionary change in cataclysmic increments is so statistically improbable as to be, for all practical purposes, impossible. Whether or not you agree with him, I propose that massive mutations of the Perfect Virus will probably be managed via a dashboard run by a human controller and driven by a programming genius. Self Awareness does not equate to either consciousness or creativity. Those are still human traits. And how those human traits came into being is beyond the scope of this discussion.