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This reminds me. There was a paper published a couple of years ago and posted here on HN that actually calculated the probability of life aminoacid-based life emerging. Based on the complexity of the chain needed to start replicating. The conclusion was that it was vanishingly small in the observable universe but only close to 0 in the full universe. I've since tried to find it without luck. Does anybody here know wh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe. Is it really "evolution" if a judge can rule that it violates copyright and stop all progress overnight? Or a random developer can add a bit of code to make sure the answers appease the right set of people? What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking what we think…
What makes you confident our evolution didn’t occur the same way? The “fossil records” of the two are similar in many ways: lots of baby steps, giant leap with no known intermediary states, lots of baby steps, …
That's just evidence of absent records, not that there are no records.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes you confident our evolution didn’t occur the same way? The “fossil records” of the two are similar in many ways: lots of baby steps, giant leap with no known intermediary states, lots of baby steps, …
> giant leap with no known intermediary states That's just evidence of absent records, not that there are no records.
Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?
Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?
Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?
No, because AI is (for now at least) shaped and constrained by us humans rather than developing free based on the laws of the universe. Is it really "evolution" if a judge can rule that it violates copyright and stop all progress overnight? Or a random developer can add a bit of code to make sure the answers appease the right set of people? What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking what we think…
Aren’t humans part of the universe’s rules? What makes AI development any less ‘free’ than any other emergent property?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> giant leap with no known intermediary states That's just evidence of absent records, not that there are no records.
Yes and?
> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature. This sentiment has always made me question when people say things are "unnatural", "artificial", or "synthetic": If we ourselves are of nature, and these things are a byproduct of us, then aren't they naturally occurring? edit: added "synthetic" to reduce ambiguity.
The fact that a naturally occurring thing (human beings) can create artificial things is not surprising under this definition.
The definition can also be theoretically extended to other human-like agents, like hypothetical aliens. It hasn't been practically very necessary so far.
Edit: I should note that this is the sense of "artificial" or "unnatural" that is used in the context of the article. There is a secondary meaning, used in phrases such as "artificial sweetner" vs "natural pesticide" that I don't think stands up too well to serious scrutiny.
Extra-terrestrial life remains a hypothetical. There is no empirical evidence it exists beyond Earth. Until we witness some kind of artificial signal, or break open an asteroid with fossilized life, or somehow visit extra solar worlds with it, or get an unexpected visit, we're simply left arguing about the math.