I'd like to start off by saying that I have officially made the transition into "old crank". It's a shame it's happened so early in my life, but it had to happen sometime. So take my comments in that context. If I've ever had a defined role on this list, it's in trying to keep the pies from flying into the sky.
Evolution is limited by mutation rates and generation times. Mammals need from 1 to 15 years before they reach reproductive age. Generation
That time is not useless or wasted. Their brains are acquiring information, molding themselves. I don't think you can just skip it.
times are long and evolution is slow. A computer could eventually simulate 10^9 (or 10^20, or
whatever) generations per second, and multiple mutation rates (to find optimal
evolutionary methodologies). It can already do as many operations per second,
it just needs to be able to do them for billions of agents.
10^ 9 generations per second? This rate depends(inversely) on the complexity of your organism.
And while fitness functions for simple ant AI's are (relatvely) simple to write and evaluate, when you start talking about human level AI, you need a very thorugh competition, involving much scoial interaction. This takes *time* whether simulated time or realtime, it will add up.
A simple model of interaction between AI's will give you simple AI's. We didn't start getting really smart until we could exchange meaningful ideas.
But yes it's true, there are stupidly insane emounts of CPU power that would give us AI instantly (although it would be so alien to us that we'd have no idea how to communicate with it). However nothing that we'll get in the next 100 century will be so vast. You'd need a computer many times the size of the earth to generate AI through evolution in a reasonable time frame.
That's not a question that I'm equipped to answer, but my educated opinion is that when we can do 10^20 flops, it'll happen. Of course, rationally designed AI could happen under far, far less computing power, if we know how to do it.
I'd be careful throwing around guesses like that. You're dealing with so many layers of unknown.
Before the accusation comes, I'm not saying these problems are unsolvable. I'm just saying that (barring planetoid computers) sufficient hardware is a tiny fraction of the problem. But I'm hearing a disconcerting level of optimism here that if we just wait long enough, it'll happen on all of our desktops with off-the shelf AI building kits.
Let me defuse another criticism of my perspective, I'm not saying we need to copy the brain. However, the brain is an excellent lesson of how Hard this problem is and should certainly be embraced as such.
-Brad
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