From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jun 19 2002 - 01:39:57 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 10:41 AM 6/18/02 -0400, Eliezer wrote:
>
>
>>All of which directly contradicts the assertion that more complex systems
>>are necessarily harder to improve. 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.
>
>
> What happened to Algernon's Law?
["Any simple attempted enhancement to human intelligence is probably a net
evolutionary disadvantage." The term "Algernon" comes from Daniel Keyes's
Hugo winner, "Flowers for Algernon".]
Think of Algernon's Law as a constraint which acts to rule out a large set
of intelligence enhancement techniques that, judging by the corpus of
science fiction, would otherwise seem plausible. If you do some deep
thinking about evolutionary anthropology and say, "Ah, here's a mutation
that only became accessible in design space very recently, and is complex
enough that it wouldn't necessarily have happened over the last fifty
thousand years or so," then this is an example of the *correct* use of
Algernon's Law - not as a cause for despair, but as a means for finding
intelligence enhancement techniques that *avoid* Algernon's Law.
As for Algernon's Law itself, it neither rules out evolution (obviously) nor
says anything about whether the speed of evolution is linear or exponential.
It just says that if you're going to postulate an intelligence enhancement
technique that could easily occur as a single mutation (or to which there
seems to exist an obvious incremental path) and which would have been very
easily possible over long periods of evolutionary time, then you may find
that intelligence enhancement is not as easy as you think.
Please remember that in much science fiction, intelligence enhancement is
apparently as easy as changing a few jumpers on the brain's factory
settings. It doesn't take much thinking at all to work around Algernon's
Law - evolution really isn't all that smart and there are many things we can
do that are not accessible to it - but you do have to put in those few extra
seconds.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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