ANARCHY AND EVOLUTION
Competition of life forms (bio-human, android, nanobots, robot) is critical for them to evolve into robust species capable of dealing with all the diversity in the universe. Early earth life had millions of years for this competition. Science has demonstrated that co-evolutionary interactions with other species are the primary cause for rapid evolution. During the singularity, we humans will be diverging into competing life forms.
   From subatomic particles to intergalactic space, the universe is in constant competition for resources. A tree shades its neighbor, stealing sunlight; ants and aphids conspire to suck the tree’s sap from its phloem vessels; the aphids’ honeydew takes the solar energy converted by photosynthesis providing carbohydrates to the ant-hill. The ant-hill’s extensive tunneling system damaging the home garden and consuming resources that would have provided calories from the sun to you and me. This complex interdependency of Earth life evolved over millions of years.
   Research in 2010 published in the journal Nature credits scientists at the University of Liverpool as providing the first experimental evidence that shows evolution is driven most powerfully by interactions between species, rather than adaptation to the environment. The team observed viruses as they evolved over hundreds of generations to infect bacteria. They found that when the bacteria could evolve defenses, the viruses evolved at a quicker rate and generated greater diversity, compared to situations where the bacteria were unable to adapt to the viral infection.
   The theory, first put forward in the 1970s, was named after a passage in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass in which the Red Queen tells Alice, "It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place." This suggested that species are in a constant race for survival and must continue to evolve new ways of defending themselves throughout time.
   Dr. Steve Paterson, from the University’s School of Biosciences, explains: "Historically, it was assumed that most evolution was driven by a need to adapt to the environment or habitat." The Red Queen Hypothesis challenged this by pointing out that actually most natural selection will arise from co-evolutionary interactions with other species, not from interactions with the environment. What this implies for our future melding of synthetic organisms and living machines is that to be robust species, they must have evolved with unconstrained competition for shared resources. It is the nightmare scenario that haunts Bill Joy. It is also very likely. Once intelligent machines are designing themselves, their goals will no longer be human based. They likely will simulate new machine designs with internal models, and then generate machine prototypes instrumented to measure success in a real world co-evolutionary environment. The intelligent machine will then use this feedback in a constant cycle of machine design, simulation, prototype, and then machine/model update. It is very conceivable that this process could accomplish in weeks what natural biology based co-evolution required hundreds of thousands of years to accomplish.

Bill Joy’s April 2000 Wired article quotes Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation:

Bill Joy says that the Gray Goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear; we cannot afford certain kinds of accidents with replicating assemblers. In his Feburary 2006 TED presentation, Bill ends his talk entreating watchers to promote national policies that "Limit access to great and unbridled power". He speaks of the million-to-one leverage of an individual (or small group) misusing powerful technology against our society’s cost to protect against them. My view is that the only way to avoid the danger of a monoculture ‘Gray Goo’ life form dominating the earth is to assure that the same principles that allow bacteria to rapidly develop defenses when faced with an evolving viral threat work also for bio-machine competition. In simple terms we need Grey Goo eating machines co-evolving with the goo ‘bacteria’.
   Is this likely to happen? Consider how future nation states will be in fierce competition to control the life forms that will replace Homo sapiens. I predict bio-wars late in this century. The resource in contention will no longer be petroleum, water or land; instead it will be control of the synthesized life components from which superior humans will evolve. Threat of a neighboring nation developing a superhuman generation twice as smart, augmented by self-healing nanotechnology, and linked by artificial intelligence computers; will foster society-wide fear. Nation states will fight to both steal and destroy such capability. This is nothing more than our genetic predisposition to compete. By this point in our future we will likely have already experienced many disasters caused by widespread famine, drought, limited nuclear and biological war. The disparity between members of the human race will then be greater than when Cro-Magnon coexisted with Neanderthal for 15,000 years in France. Within one hundred years the competition between modern man and ‘future’ man will be in earnest.
   I argue that by 2100, the human race will have begun to stratify into different breeds, eventually into different species (if the term species even applies). We will have begun to merge synthetic organisms and living machines into purpose made life forms tailored for particular environments and functions; living under water, living in space habitats, living on the moon and Mars. These new life forms could be compared to the evolution of mammals from reptiles. The transition has already begun. The Astrobiology Magazine 2010 article ―Cyborgs Needed for Escape from Earth quotes historian Roger Launius, who calls himself a cyborg for using medical equipment to enhance his own life, says "the difficult question is knowing where to draw the line in transforming human biological systems to adapt to space." While financial and ethical concerns may have held back cyborg research, Launius believes that society may have to engage in the cyborg debate again when space programs get closer to launching long-term deep space exploration missions. George Friedman argues that when we try to predict the future, common sense almost always betrays us. In considering the rapid evolution of our species, all of our instincts betray us. It is extremely difficult to imagine the consequences of the genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics processes now shaping our future.
   In counter-point, there is Ray Kurzweil’s single-minded plan to live forever in a magical distant future. His dream blinds him to the messy future he is actually going to live in. What possible utility would a future world have for digitally stored brains? Even if we only stored one percent; consider how much redundancy and for what purpose? It seems so silly to me. Like a technologist’s alternative to heaven. I don’t think anyone alive can predict what we will be evolving ourselves into. The question for us today is whether we wish to collectively guide this evolution, and if so, whether that is even possible.