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eli_sennesh comments on 2013 Survey Results - Less Wrong
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So far in the history of technology, deliberate design over a period of years has proven consistently less clever (in the sense of "efficiently capturing available mass-energy as living bodies") than evolution operating over aeons.
And so far the more clever biosphere design is getting its thermodynamical shit handed to it everywhere the hairless apes go and decide to start building and burning stuff.
If a wish to a genie went really wrong and switched the terminal goals of every human on earth into destroying the earth's biosphere in the most thorough and efficient way possible, the biosphere would be toast, much cleverer than the humans or not. If the wish gave you a billion AGI robots with the that terminal goal, any humans getting in their way would be dead and the biosphere would be toast again. But if the robots were really small and maybe not that smart, then we'd be entirely okay, right?
Think about it: it's the intelligence that makes things dangerous. Try and engineer a nanoscale robot that's going to be able to unintelligently disassemble all living matter without getting eaten by a bacterium. Unintelligently, mind you: no invoking superintelligence as your fallback explanation.
Humans aren't superintelligent, and are still able to design macroscale technology that can wipe out biospheres and that can be deployed and propagated with less intelligence than it took to design. I'm not taking the bet that you can't shrink down the scale of the technology and the amount of intelligence needed to deploy it while keeping around the at least human level designer. That sounds too much like the "I can't think of a way to do this right now, so it's obviously impossible" play.
It seems that very few people considered the bad nanotech scenario obviously impossible, merely less likely to cause a near extinction event than uFAI.
In addition, to my best knowledge, trained scientists believe it impossible to turn the sky green and have all humans sprout spider legs. Mostly, they believe these things are impossible because they're impossible, not because scientists merely lack the leap of superintelligence or superdetermination necessary to kick logic out and do the impossible.
If I wanted to turn the sky green for some reason (and had an infinite budget to work with), then one way to do it would be to release a fine, translucent green powder in the upper atmosphere in large quantities. (This might cause problems when it began to drift down far enough that it can be breathed in, of course). Alternatively, I could encase the planet Earth in a solid shell of green glass.
Make it out of antimatter? Say, a nanoscale amount of anticarbon - just an unintelligent lump?
Dump enough of those on any (matter) biosphere and all the living matter will be very thoroughly disassembled.
That's not a nanoscale robot, is it? It's antimatter: it annihilates matter, because that's what physics says it does. You're walking around the problem I handed you and just solving the "destroy lots of stuff" problem. Yes, it's easy to destroy lots of stuff: we knew that already. And yet if I ask you to invent grey goo in specific, you don't seem able to come up with a feasible design.
How is it not a nanoscale robot? It is a nanoscale device that performs the assigned task. What does a robot have that the nanoscale anticarbon lump doesn't?
I admit that it's not the sort of thing one thinks of when one thinks of the word 'robot' (to be fair, though, what I think of when I think of the word 'robot' is not nanoscale either). But I have found that, often, a simple solution to a problem can be found by, as you put it, 'walking around' it to get to the desired outcome.
I'll have to disagree here. Evolution operating over aeons never got to jet engines and nuclear weapons. Maybe it needs more time?
Category error: neither jet engines nor nuclear weapons capture available/free mass-energy as living (ie: self-reproducing) bodies. Evolution never got to those because it simply doesn't care about them: nuclear bombs can't have grandchildren.
You can use both jet engines and nuclear weapons to increase your relative fitness.
There are no living nuclear reactors, either, despite the vast potential of energy.
There are organisms that use gamma radiation as an energy source. If we lived in an environment richer in naturally occurring radioisotopes, I think I'd expect to see more of this sort of thing -- maybe not up to the point of criticality, but maybe so.
Not much point in speculating, really; living on a planet that's better than four billion years old and of middling metallicity puts something of a damper on the basic biological potential of that pathway.
And yet humanity did it, on a much smaller time scale. This is what I'm saying, we are better than evolution at some stuff.
Which living beings created by evolution have done -- also known as us!
This would be stretching the definition of evolution beyond its breaking point.
Evolution has got as far as basic jet engines; see the octopus for an example.
Interestingly, this page provides some interesting data; it seems that a squid's jet is significantly less energy-efficient than a fish's tail for propulsion. This implies that that's perhaps why we see so little jet propulsion in the oceans...
... because we don't know how to build "living bodies". That's a rather unfair comparison, regardless of whether your point is valid.
Although, of course, we built factory farms for that exact purpose, which are indeed more efficient at that task.
And there's genetic engineering, which can leapfrog over millions of years of evolution by nicking (simple, at our current tech level) adaptations from other organisms - whereas evolution would have to recreate them from scratch. I reflexively avoid anti-GM stuff due to overexposure when I was younger, but I wouldn't be surprised if a GM organism could outcompete a wild one, were a mad scientist to choose that as a goal rather than a disaster to be elaborately defended against. (Herbicide-resistant plants, for a start.)
So I suppose it isn't even very good at biasing the results, since it can still fail - depending, of course, on how true of a scotsman you are, because those do take advantage of prexisting adaptations - and artificially induced ones, in the case of farm animals.
(Should this matter? Discuss.)