I think it’s very unlikely that Earth has seen other species as intelligent as humans (with the possible exception of other Homo species). In short, I suspect there is strong selection pressure for (at least many of) the different traits that allow humans to have civilization to go together. Consider dexterity – such skills allow one to use intelligence to make tools; that is, the more dexterous one is, the greater the evolutionary value of high intelligence, and the more intelligent one is, the greater the evolutionary value of dexterity. Similar positive feedback loops also seem likely between intelligence and: longevity, being omnivorous, having cumulative culture, hypersociality, language ability, vocal control, etc.
Additionally, birds and mammals are both considered unusually intelligent for animals (more so than reptiles, amphibians, fish, etc), and both birds and mammals have seen (neurological evidence of) gradual trends of increasing (maximum) intelligence over the course of the past 100 MY or more (and even extant nonhuman great apes seem most likely to be somewhat smarter than their last common ancestors with humans). So if there was a previously intelligent species, I’d be scratching my head about when it would have evolved. While we can’t completely rule out a previous species as smart as humans (we also can’t completely rule out a previous technological species, for which all artifacts have been destroyed), I think the balance of evidence is pretty strongly against, though I’ll admit that not everyone shares this view. Personally, I’d be absolutely shocked if there were 10+ (not very closely related) previous intelligent species, which is what would be required to reduce compute by just 1 OOM. (And even then, insofar as the different species shared a common ancestor, there still could be a hard step that the ancestor passed.)
But I do think it’s the case that certain bottlenecks on Earth wouldn’t be a bottleneck for engineers. For instance, I think there’s a good chance that we simply got lucky in the past several hundred million years for the climate staying ~stable instead of spiraling into uninhabitable hothouse or snowball states (i.e., we may be subject to survivorship bias here); this seems very easy for human engineers to work around in simulations. The same is plausibly true for other bottlenecks as well.
Re: Brain imitation learning
My cop-out answer here is that this is already covered by the “other methods” section. My real answer is that the model isn’t great at handling approaches that are intermediate between different methods. I agree it makes sense to continue to watch this space.
Thanks for the comments!
Re: The Hard Paths Hypothesis
I think it’s very unlikely that Earth has seen other species as intelligent as humans (with the possible exception of other Homo species). In short, I suspect there is strong selection pressure for (at least many of) the different traits that allow humans to have civilization to go together. Consider dexterity – such skills allow one to use intelligence to make tools; that is, the more dexterous one is, the greater the evolutionary value of high intelligence, and the more intelligent one is, the greater the evolutionary value of dexterity. Similar positive feedback loops also seem likely between intelligence and: longevity, being omnivorous, having cumulative culture, hypersociality, language ability, vocal control, etc.
Regarding dolphins and whales, it is true that many have more neurons than us, but they also have thin cortices, low neuronal packing densities, and low axonal conduction velocities (in addition to lower EQs than humans).
Additionally, birds and mammals are both considered unusually intelligent for animals (more so than reptiles, amphibians, fish, etc), and both birds and mammals have seen (neurological evidence of) gradual trends of increasing (maximum) intelligence over the course of the past 100 MY or more (and even extant nonhuman great apes seem most likely to be somewhat smarter than their last common ancestors with humans). So if there was a previously intelligent species, I’d be scratching my head about when it would have evolved. While we can’t completely rule out a previous species as smart as humans (we also can’t completely rule out a previous technological species, for which all artifacts have been destroyed), I think the balance of evidence is pretty strongly against, though I’ll admit that not everyone shares this view. Personally, I’d be absolutely shocked if there were 10+ (not very closely related) previous intelligent species, which is what would be required to reduce compute by just 1 OOM. (And even then, insofar as the different species shared a common ancestor, there still could be a hard step that the ancestor passed.)
But I do think it’s the case that certain bottlenecks on Earth wouldn’t be a bottleneck for engineers. For instance, I think there’s a good chance that we simply got lucky in the past several hundred million years for the climate staying ~stable instead of spiraling into uninhabitable hothouse or snowball states (i.e., we may be subject to survivorship bias here); this seems very easy for human engineers to work around in simulations. The same is plausibly true for other bottlenecks as well.
Re: Brain imitation learning
My cop-out answer here is that this is already covered by the “other methods” section. My real answer is that the model isn’t great at handling approaches that are intermediate between different methods. I agree it makes sense to continue to watch this space.