Our intelligence was enough to turn some balding apes into atom-bomb wielders and astronauts over a few thousand generations.
Consider a hypothetical: it is possible to make a semiconductor clone of a human brain, that runs at semiconductor speeds, has semiconductor size-scale, and has a power requirement of the Landauer limit.
This copy would be smaller than a pea, and you'd get to pick on a sliding scale between "same power draw as human but thinks faster than us to the same multiplier that we jog faster than continental drift" or "thinks as fast as we do while using around a few µW of power".
We do not know how to do this. We don't know how far we are from figuring out how to do this. We do know* evolution made our brains, and we do use simulated evolution as a standard technique in machine learning.
But it may well be that just as no human knows how to design a human mind, we find the best AI we can make don't know how to make a better AI, at which point they're stumbling blind in the dark: while evolution is a neat method, it is limited, blind to what the best next step is at any moment.
* well, those of us who are not creationists, at least.
alt Hacker News
Our intelligence was enough to turn some balding apes into atom-bomb wielders and astronauts over a few thousand generations.
Consider a hypothetical: it is possible to make a semiconductor clone of a human brain, that runs at semiconductor speeds, has semiconductor size-scale, and has a power requirement of the Landauer limit.
This copy would be smaller than a pea, and you'd get to pick on a sliding scale between "same power draw as human but thinks faster than us to the same multiplier that we jog faster than continental drift" or "thinks as fast as we do while using around a few µW of power".
We do not know how to do this. We don't know how far we are from figuring out how to do this. We do know* evolution made our brains, and we do use simulated evolution as a standard technique in machine learning.
But it may well be that just as no human knows how to design a human mind, we find the best AI we can make don't know how to make a better AI, at which point they're stumbling blind in the dark: while evolution is a neat method, it is limited, blind to what the best next step is at any moment.
* well, those of us who are not creationists, at least.