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SilentCal comments on Open thread, Oct. 13 - Oct. 19, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Non-Linnaean wildlife. Built de novo by the superintelligence; made of the same sorts of organic materials as normal species, but not related to them; possibly not nucleic-acid based/non-reproductive. Their inner workings are simpler and more efficient; no symbiotic mitochondria and chloroplasts, but rather purpose-built modules. They are edible, and the survivors know the unique taste of, e.g., their 'muscle' tissue, which is not actin/myosin based.
Don't think we need a superintelligence for that.
Interesting! But while we're a lot closer than I realized, we probably aren't going to be thoroughly out-designing evolution from the bottom up on macroscopic animal-like creatures any time soon.
Depends on the criteria of "out-designing". If they are something evolution had never any reason to optimize for (e.g. lots of tasty-for-humans meat fast), I don't see why not.
I think "from the bottom up" is the hard criterion. We can fiddle with the knobs evolution has produced, but it doesn't sound like we have the insight to replace basic building blocks like mitochondria and [dr]na.
Well, how deep is your bottom? You said "made of the same sorts of organic materials as normal species", so did you just mean carbon-based chemistry? something that depends on slow room-temperature reactions in liquids and gels?
You want something different, but not too different (like a metal-based robot), so what's the Goldilocks distance from plain old regular life?
I think my Goldilocks range is along the lines of 'probably made of proteins and lipids and such; preferable edible or at least biodegradable by ordinary bacteria (I don't know what this requires); a human non-biologist without tools could mistake it for normal'.
But it's pretty interesting to think about possibilities at other ranges, too.
Evolution searches nearby spaces of what already exists with astonishing exhaustiveness. But if there isn't a chain of viable intermediaries between one form and another, then the second will just not arise, no matter how fit for survival it would be. This isn't a problem that afflicts an biological engineer, and said engineer also has the example of what evolution has already come up with to work off. So, massively out-designing evolution ? Sure. That's not even a hard trick for a singularity mind.