Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by evc123 3281 days ago
Evolution has been running ~10^19 experiments in parallel for billions of years: http://reducing-suffering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-ther...

Evolution is a slow algorithm, but it had access to an absurd amount of compute (all neuronal organic matter on Earth) and environment simulation (all of physical reality on Earth) when discovering us; so the discovery of the algorithms/architectures/principles in our heads shouldn't be viewed as trivial.

1 comments

The massive compute/time advantage evolution has makes me bearish about AGI. We really need to fix our compute capabilities before we can start overruning evolution. The math dictates it'll happen, but exponentially slowly if we don't innovate in compute.
There's more to the story, too: advances on top of CRISP may give us better tools to self-improve the species, accelerating evolution.

Personally, I'm bearish about AGI because I believe we will eventually realize that the brain is a glorified linear regression too, with a custom wiring to help learn language and vision.

What do you mean when you say that the brain is a glorified linear regression?