Tim, honestly, brother, aren’t we arguing semantics? Whether we call the process of evolution “blind” or “intelligent” up to this point, certainly it will be a new event in evolutionary history if the kind of self-improving AI that Eliezer is talking about takes off...
The issue I was addressing was how best to view such a phenomenon.
Is it simply intelligence “looping back on itself”, creating a strange loop?
I would say no: intelligence has been “looping back on itself” for hundreds of millions of years.
In the past, we have had “intelligent selection”. Look closely, and there have also been “intelligent mutations”—and deductive and inductive inference. Those are the essential elements of intelligent design. So, what is new? Previously, any “intelligent mutations” have had to be transferred into the germ line via the Baldwin effect—and that is a slow process—since direct germ line mutations have been effectively undirected.
In my view, the single biggest and most significant change involved is the origin of new writable heritable materials: human cultural inheritance—the new replicators. That led to big brains, language, farming, society, morality, writing, science, technology—and soon superintelligence.
Even if you paint intelligent design as the important innovation, that’s been going on for thousands of years. Engineering computing machinery is not really something new—we’ve been doing it for decades. Machines working on designing other machines isn’t really new either.
These changes all lie in the past. What will happen in the forseeable future is mostly the ramifications of shifts that started long ago gradually playing themselves out.
The issue I was addressing was how best to view such a phenomenon.
Is it simply intelligence “looping back on itself”, creating a strange loop?
I would say no: intelligence has been “looping back on itself” for hundreds of millions of years.
In the past, we have had “intelligent selection”. Look closely, and there have also been “intelligent mutations”—and deductive and inductive inference. Those are the essential elements of intelligent design. So, what is new? Previously, any “intelligent mutations” have had to be transferred into the germ line via the Baldwin effect—and that is a slow process—since direct germ line mutations have been effectively undirected.
In my view, the single biggest and most significant change involved is the origin of new writable heritable materials: human cultural inheritance—the new replicators. That led to big brains, language, farming, society, morality, writing, science, technology—and soon superintelligence.
Even if you paint intelligent design as the important innovation, that’s been going on for thousands of years. Engineering computing machinery is not really something new—we’ve been doing it for decades. Machines working on designing other machines isn’t really new either.
These changes all lie in the past. What will happen in the forseeable future is mostly the ramifications of shifts that started long ago gradually playing themselves out.