On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 10:08 PM, just camel <[email protected]> wrote: > Matt (et al), > > Do you think it is likely that stronger/different evolutionary pressures on > life on a distant planet (let's ignore different universes with different > laws of nature for now) could result in a species which > > a) had to be way more intelligent/rational than Homo sapiens in order to > become the/a dominant/technological species and thus allowing them to arrive > at their AGI equivalent way earlier/easier because of their higher a priori > intelligence?
We can't assume that we will develop AGI. The problem seems to be much harder than anyone first anticipated. That said, I believe we will develop the technology to solve hard problems in language, vision, art, and robotics, allowing us to automate most paid labor. Some people might not consider that to be AGI, since it won't be anything like a sentient agent or "artificial human". It will look more like a ubiquitous and smarter internet that is always with us. Evolution, of course, does not care about such things unless it leads to more offspring. > b) features a less complicated or more flexible "brain" that would be more > straight forward to augment/upgrade for them? Like hair that just grows as > you consume food ... more processing power in good times, less processing > power in bad times. Of course this would not work with our own brain design > as processing power and memory are somewhat interwoven. Intelligence requires complexity, at least according to Legg's work. http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0606070 So the question is whether life could evolve faster under other conditions. It seems that biology is comparable to the limits of self replicating nanotechnology with regard to reproduction rate, spread, size, and energy cost of computation. http://www.foresight.org/nano/Ecophagy.html Nanotechnology would have a few advantages over DNA based life. 1. The biosphere uses 0.1% of available solar power. Solar cells could easily achieve 10-20% efficiency. 2. The materials used in computers, silicon, oxygen, and aluminum, are the three most abundant elements in the Earth's crust. 3. Molecular computation in biology is a billion times more energy efficient than silicon, but still a thousand times less efficient than thermodynamic limits. 4. Nanotechnology with suitable design could survive in space. Thus, it could build a Dyson sphere to capture all of the Sun's output. > So this question really is about the universality of evolution and whether > some life forms might have huge advantages over Homo sapiens when it comes > to creating AGI/BCI/WEB technology (and I will not even write about the > implications on Fermi's paradox this time). Humans are the first species to develop language enabling us to organize on a global scale. That doesn't necessarily make us more intelligent. Collectively, all human brains perform 10^25 operations per second on 10^24 synapses. However, there are 10^30 bacteria performing 10^31 operations per second on 10^37 DNA bases. Bacteria could wipe out humans and survive without us. We could neither wipe out bacteria nor survive without them. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
