[Retric]

> Grown exponentially since the first life form

Not really. The total computing power available to humanity per person has likely gone down as we replaced “self driving” horses with cars.

People created those curve by fitting definitions to the curve rather than data.

[Nevermark]

You can't disprove global warming by pointing out an extra cool evening.

But I don't understand your point even as stated. Cars took over from horses as technology provided transport with greater efficiencies and higher capabilities than "horse technology".

Subsequently transport technology continued improving. And continues, into new forms and scales.

How do you see the alternative, where somehow horses were ... bred? ... to keep up?

[reaperman]

Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than horses. GP was pointing out that horses can think. On a particularly well-trained horse, you could fall asleep on it and wake up back at your house. You can find viral videos of Amish people still doing this today.

[Terr_]

> Cars do not strictly have higher capabilities than horses.

Another way to see it: A horse (or any animal) is a goddamn nanobot-swarm with a functioning hivemind that is literally beyond human science in many important ways. Unlike a horse:

* Your car (nor even half of them) does not possess a manufacturing bay capable of creating additional cars.

* Your car does not have a robust self-repair system.

* Your car does not detect strain its structure and then rebuild stronger.

* Your car does not synthesize its fuel from a wide variety of potential local resources.

* Your car does not defend itself by hacking and counter-hacking attacks other nanobots, or even just by rust.

* Your car does not manufacture and deploy its own replacement lubricants, cooling fluid, or ground-surface grip/padding material.

* Your car is not designed to survive intermittent immersion in water.

In both a feature-list and raw-computation sense, we've discarded huge amounts in order to get a much much smaller set that we care more about.

[Nevermark]

The car isn’t intelligence.

Not sure why you are implying cars outdid horses intelligence.

Cars are a product of our minds. We have all those self-repair abilities, and we have more intelligence than a horse.

But horses intelligence didn’t let them keep up with what the changing environment, changed by us, needed. So there are less horses.

The rate that horse or human bodies are improving, or our minds, despite human knowledge still advancing, is very slow compared to advances in machines designed specifically for advancement. Initially to accelerate our own advancement.

Now the tech, that was designed to accelerate tech, is taking on a life of its own.

That is how foundational advances happen. They don’t start ahead, but they move ahead because of new advantages.

It is often initially much simpler. But in ways that unlock greater potential.

Machines are certainly much simpler than us. But, much easier to improve and scale.

You recognize the new thing even before it dominates, because in a tiny fraction of the time the old system got to where it is, the new system is already moving much much faster.

If general AI appears before 2047, it will have taken less than 100 years to grow from the first transistor.

People will see it who are older than the first transistor!

Nothing on the planet has ever come close to that speed of progress. From nothing to front runner. By many many many orders of magnitude.

[Terr_]

Retric referred to "total computing power".

A horse has trillions of cells, and even one of those cells is doing more biochemical day-to-day computation than your car's automatic transmission does electronically or mechanically.

[Nevermark]

It feels like maybe you didn’t read what I said, or understand it.

A car was never an example of its own intelligence.

It was an example of our natural human intelligence’s & our growing cultural knowledge’s impact on horses.

How much have horses progressed. Math yet?

More computation doesn’t necessarily mean more intelligence. Horses are smart creatures, I ride one. He is my friend.

But they are not us, not our joint culture, and not any competition for today’s machines in terms of adapting and growing in capabilities.

The fact that machines are far simpler than us or a horse, but advancing faster is much like we were weaker but used our minds better than other apes.

Simpler in the right way is smarter. As many major advances in mathematics have demonstrated.

[Nevermark]

Ah, good point. Then the global warming point applies, but in a much less trivial way.

There is turbulence in any big directed change. Better overall new tech often creates inconveniences, performs less well, than some of the tech it replaces. Sometimes only initially, but sometimes for longer periods of time.

A net gain, but we all remember simpler things whose reliability and convenience we miss.

And some old tech retains lasting benefits in niche areas. Old school, inefficient and cheap light bulbs are ironically, not so inefficient when used where their heat is useful.

And horses fit that pattern. They are still not obsolete in many ways, tied to their intelligence. As companions. As still working and inspiring creatures.

--

I suspect the history of evolution is filled with creatures getting that got wiped out by new waves, that were more generally advanced, but less advanced in a few ways.

And we have a small percentage of remarkable ancient creatures still living today, seemingly little changed.

[Retric]

The issue is more than just a local cold snap. When the fundamental graph you’re basing a theory on is wrong it’s worth rejecting the theory.

The total computing power of life on earth the fact it’s fallen over the last 1,000 years. Ants alone represent something like 50x the computing power of all humans and all computers on the planet and we’ve reduced the number of insects on earth more than we’ve added humans or computing power.

The same is true through a great number of much longer events. Periods of ice ages and even larger scale events aren’t just an afternoon even across geological timescales.

[Nevermark]

You could just as well talk about the computing power of every microbe.

Or all the quarks that make up the Earth.

Ants don’t even appear on either graph.

But the flexibility, coordination & leverage of information used to increase its flexibility, coordination & leverage further is what I am talking about.

I.e. intelligence.

A trillion trillion trillion transistors wouldn’t mean anything, acting individually.

But when that many work together with one purpose without redundancy we can’t imagine the problems it will see & solve.

Quarks, microbes, and your ants are not progressing like that. What was there most recent advance? How long did that take? Is it a compounding advance?

Growing intelligence doesn’t mean lesser intelligences don’t still exist.

We happen to compete based on intelligence, so the impacts of smarter machines have a particularly low latency for us.

[Retric]

You could of course exclude biological computation and say computational power started with mechanical computers very recently, but that’s not what they are trying to argue. As soon as they add biological life as data on the chart then the actual numbers become relevant to their argument.

IE: As soon as you pick definition X, you need to stick with that definition.

[TeMPOraL]

There's stuff horses can do better than even the best of our current technology. Where that stuff matters, horses are still employed.

Where cars displaced horses, it's because they're strictly better in a larger sense. On the city streets, maybe a car is louder than a horse, but it's also cheaper to make, easier to feed, and doesn't shit all over the place (which was a real problem with scaling up horse use in the 19th century!). Sure, cars shit into the air, but it's a more manageable problem (even if mostly by ignoring it - gaseous emissions can be ignored, literal horse shit on the streets can't).

And then, car as a platform expands to cover use cases horses never could. They can be made faster, safer, bigger, adapted to all kinds of terrain. The heart of the car - its engine - can be routed to power tool attachments, giving you everything from garbage trucks to earth movers, cranes, diggers, to tanks; it can be also taken outside and used as a generator to power equipment or buildings. That same engine can be put in a different frame to give you flying machines, or scaled up to give you ships that can carry people, cars, tanks, planes or containers by the thousands, across oceans. Or scaled up even more to create power plants supplying electricity to millions of people.

And then, building all that up was intertwined with larger developments in physics, material engineering, and chemistry - the latter of which effectively transformed how our daily lives look like in the span of 50 years. Look at everything around you. All the colors. All the containers. All the stuff you use to keep your house, clothes, and yourself clean. All that is a product of chemical industry, and was invented pretty much within the last 100 years, with no direct equivalent exiting ever before.

This is what it means for evolution accelerating when it moved from genes to information. So sure, horses are still better than stuff we make. The best measure of that advantage is the size of horse population, and how it changed over the years.