I was reading this rant about the problems involved with copying and pasting bits of code from one project to another—it’s a vector for bloat, and coding errors, and just plain non-comprehension of what code is actually supposed to do—and something odd occurred to me.

It’s becoming more and more evident that horizontal gene transfer played a role in the evolution of life on this planet, even that of higher life forms. Now, cut-and-paste is an inelegant metaphor for HGT, but the idea struck me as amusing: we’re the product of billions of years of genomic cut-and-paste.

Skynet may come to pass, but not by design. It will arise from some POS system that’s been worked over by one too many teams of code monkeys pasting bits of other systems into it.