From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jun 18 2002 - 09:02:53 MDT
On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 10:41:55AM -0400, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Anders Sandberg wrote:
> > My personal view is that evolution does indeed accelerate, but in the
> > form of adding new and faster layers on top of the old ones. Metabolic
> > evolution is terribly slow. Body plan evolution is faster. Then nervous
> > systems and adaptivity added an even faster layer,
>
> All of which directly contradicts the assertion that more complex systems
> are necessarily harder to improve.
Is the nervous system more complex than metabolism? Is culture more
complex than the nervous system? It is not obviously the case. The
brain has 10^11 neurons (much more than the number of chemical
species in our bodies), but the wiring is surprisingly regular on
the local level and the learning rules that produce a complicated
behavior are not terribly complex. The resulting space of behavior
is harder to judge. As for culture, it clearly has an extremely
wide range of possible variation, but the underlying processes
taking place within it may not be as complex as we would like to
think.
> Evolution, acting entirely without
> foresight, has managed to set things up so that more and more complex
> systems offer more and more handles for making adaptive changes, and ways to
> control more and more coordinated complexity through atomic mutations to
> single genes that govern complex systems.
But these simple gene mutations doesn't produce truly complex
changes, at least not if you compare them to the complexity already
present. They are not so much handles managing complexity as better
tools for evolution to try out hopeful monsters with.
The growth in complexity may be more horizontal than vertical: each
new layer adds adaptability and a huge new statespace to explore.
But the new layer doesn't have to be super-complex, it is just
more free.
> > which enabled an super-fast layer of behavioral and cultural change. But
> > if this carries over to intelligence development, it might turn out that
> > the road to superintelligence is not by looking at super-hardware or
> > super-software, but by looking at super-memetics or super-culture.
>
> Evolution's higher levels of organization are also characterized by
> decreased efficiency. Proteins are held together by weak Van der
> Waals forces rather than orbital sharing, to the detriment of us
> protein-based lifeforms. Evolution's way of hacking evolvability without
> intelligence unfortunately creates certain vulnerabilities, which are very
> hard to get rid of because of evolution's inability to handle simultaneous
> dependencies - evolution cannot intelligently refactor DNA to use
> diamondoid instead of protein. The creation of intelligence permits us to
> step outside the limited pathways of evolution and reopen the lower levels
> of organization to intelligent improvement.
Yes. But it is not clear how much intelligence can readily fix
these lower levels - upgrading ones metabolism is not a simple task
outside some obvious tricks. It can probably be done with enough
tech and intelligence, but the effort is significant. It is usually
easier to add on top instead.
> Or to put it another way: A human super-culture such as the Earthweb,
> ultimately based on 200Hz neurons in nonagglomerative brains, could
> probably beat our contemporary society in a fair fight, but would be
> instantly crushed by a postbiological superintelligence that thought, oh,
> say, a billion times faster (200GHz substrate).
It depends on whether the postbiological intelligence was an
uploaded dog or not; what is its adaptability and ability to
fashion, test and field new solutions to problems surrounding
itself? Usually supertintelligence is just assumed to be a very
high level of this, but then the speed becomes less interesting as
a measure. It could well be that a 200GHz Earthweb beats a 200Hz
superintelligence even when the units of the Earthweb are
relatively stupid. And then both get invaded by ants.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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