[zackmorris]

You know, I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything you've said (especially limitations of SIMD regarding neurons etc). I'm kind of borrowing from Kurzweil with the brute force stuff, but at the same time I think there is truth to the idea that basic evolution can solve any problem, given enough time or computing power.

I guess what I'm getting at, without quite realizing it until just now, is that AI can be applied to ANY problem, even the problem of how to create an AGI. That's where I think we're most likely to see exponential gains in even just the next 5-10 years.

For a concrete example of this, I read Koza's Genetic Programming III edition back when it came out. The most fascinating parts of the book for me were the chapters where he revisited genetic algorithm experiments done in previous decades but with orders of magnitude more computing power at hand so that they could run the same experiment repeatedly. They were able to test meta aspects of evolution and begin to come up with best practices for deriving evolution tuning parameters that reminded me of tuning neural net hyperparameters (which is still a bit of an art).

Thanks for the insight on higher order meaning, I've felt something similar lately, seeing the web and exponential growth of technology as some kind of meta organism recruiting all of our minds/computers/corporations.