On 26/09/2014 18:37, Matt Mahoney via AGI wrote:
This has implications for an intelligence explosion. I described the limits on computing power. Also, the exponential growth of knowledge is really just the result of the growth of technology needed to store and transmit it: language, writing, the printing press, the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, computers, and internet. Now we are close to collecting all of the 10^17 bits of human knowledge stored in our collective brains and making it instantly available to everyone. Then where will additional knowledge come from? No agent can make another agent that knows more than itself. Evolution is notoriously slow, transmitting only one bit per generation to the genome.
The arguments that "evolution is slow" are pretty silly, IMO. In modern times, it is cultural evolution we should be considering. There, the generation time is the time taken for a meme to go through its lifecycle. If humans are in the loop, that can be hours or days, but once machines are processing ideas, the generation time of many memes will plummet. The idea that you only get one bit-per-generation is based on a series of assumptions that don't apply to organic evolution - let alone cultural evolution. It is assumed that there's only one population. The bits in question are (confusingly) measures of adaptive information transmitted via selective deaths. It's assumed that half the population dies in each generation. Of course in real-world evolution, there are other ways of getting useful information into the genome. You can choose sexual partners from a pool of prospective mates. Or you can kill 99% of the population and breed from the remaining 1%. Or, you can insert information directly into the genome, using genetic engineering. There's no known speed limit on evolution. The faster we can copy, and the larger the size of the populations involved, the faster evolution can progress. There are thought to be limits on copying speed (associated with the Bekenstein Bound) - though these seem far off. However, we don't know of a limit on population size. -- __________ |im |yler http://timtyler.org/ [email protected] Remove lock to reply. ------------------------------------------- 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
