soreff comments on Ben Goertzel: The Singularity Institute's Scary Idea (and Why I Don't Buy It) - Less Wrong

32 Post author: ciphergoth 30 October 2010 09:31AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (432)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: soreff 07 November 2010 03:03:03PM 0 points [-]

Designers can well design things more complicated than they are.

Agreed. Also, there is a continuum from pure evolution (with no foresight at all) to evaluation of potential designs with varying degrees of sophistication before fabricating them. (I know that I'm recalling this from a post somewhere on this site - please excuse the absence of proper credit assignment.) An example of a dumb process which is marginally smarter than evolution is to take mutation plus recombination and then do a simple gradient search to the nearest local optimum before evaluating the design.

Comment author: wedrifid 07 November 2010 04:37:57PM 1 point [-]

Also, there is a continuum from pure evolution (with no foresight at all) to evaluation of potential designs with varying degrees of sophistication before fabricating them.

I'll add that evolution with DNA and sexual reproduction already in place fits on a different part of this continuum from evolution of the simplest replicators.

Comment author: XiXiDu 07 November 2010 04:35:23PM 0 points [-]

Designers can guide evolution but it is still evolution that creates novelty.

Whatever intelligence is, it can't be intelligent all the way down. It's just dumb stuff at the bottom. — Andy Clark

Intelligence is a process facilitated by evolution. Even an AGI making perfect use of some of our most novel algorithms wouldn't come up with something novel without evolution. See Bayesian Methods and Universal Darwinism.