71–80 of 191 posts
When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure.
Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
When I was younger, I was fascinated by evolution, especially the intricacies of how things just work. This fascination also explains why many people believe in the intelligent design theory. However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
The key insight for both evolution and contemporary AI is that hill-climbing (either completely random a la evolution, or guided locally like in back-propagation) can work really well, if you have enough dimensions to play with. Hill climbing obviously gets stuck easily in 2 or 3 dimensions. So our intuition ain't reliable.
Also our intuition about overfitting from lower-dimensional representations seems to be less of an issue at high dimensions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adults crawl all the time
Adults never choose to crawl, unless in tight spaces or drunk off their rocker.
I.e. why wasn't in simpler in evolutionary terms to come up with some mechanism where 1% of the brain was dedicated to the relatively simple task of "station keeping", while the rest of the brain could benefit from sleep?
This article doesn't even try to address what I feel is the deeper and more interesting question (but probably one that can't be answered): Why is it that horses, cows, giraffes and birds have all had to come up with a purely passive solution of "locking" themselves in place, either via their joints (for the four-legged), or via the tendon mechanism described here for birds? I.e. why wasn't in simpler in evolutionary…
This article doesn't even try to address what I feel is the deeper and more interesting question (but probably one that can't be answered): Why is it that horses, cows, giraffes and birds have all had to come up with a purely passive solution of "locking" themselves in place, either via their joints (for the four-legged), or via the tendon mechanism described here for birds? I.e. why wasn't in simpler in evolutionary…
This article doesn't even try to address what I feel is the deeper and more interesting question (but probably one that can't be answered): Why is it that horses, cows, giraffes and birds have all had to come up with a purely passive solution of "locking" themselves in place, either via their joints (for the four-legged), or via the tendon mechanism described here for birds? I.e. why wasn't in simpler in evolutionary…
Also, why didn't any animal evolve a way to avoid sleep completely?
I could just be misremembering things, so I’m not certain.