The Mote in God’s Eye by Niven and Pournelle depicts an intelligent species that stayed biological a little too long, slowly becoming truly enslaved by evolution, gradually turning into true fitness maximizers obsessed with outreproducing each other. But thankfully that’s not what happened. Not here on Earth. At least not yet.
This is an interesting and important paragraph; and it explains some things about Eliezer’s views. It’s important enough to justify. But I don’t see evidence for the idea that evolution gets more oppressive as time passes. Is this a trend in historical data? No; organisms acquire more degrees of freedom as they become more complex.
The unspoken assumption is that organisms continue to evolve, yet don’t increase in complexity—imagining humans to continue to evolve, yet without passing beyond the human stage. Perhaps moties would be the result. We see here in the US that evolution very rapidly rewards cultures and religions that forbid birth control and/or encourage large families.
On the other hand, these cultures’ and religions’ growth in number of humans does not result in an equal growth in money and power and control of resources.
I don’t have an answer; but this idea, almost skipped over, that evolution will inevitably lead to bad things, is a powerful motivator of FAI, CEV, and all such take-over-the-universe schemes. So it needs much more explication than a one-sentence reference to a Niven novel.
The question is indeed interesting, but the presumed answer is a powerful motivator for whom? Even if human evolution will lead to a super-amazing future of greatness, I doubt that future would be as super-amazing as a correctly implemented FAI; avoiding dystopian evolutionary existential catastrophes has never been listed as main reason for wanting to build a friendly really powerful optimization process by anyone I’ve talked to. Most don’t think humanity will even get that far.
But I’m curious as to what your intuitions are regarding the probably counterfactual world where humans continue evolving for a long, long time.
Eliezer has a bias against evolution, and a bias against randomness, as exhibited in his series ending in Worse than Random, which is factually correct in the details, but misleading in the real world, as demonstrated by repeated times when his acolytes have used it to attack probabilistic search, probabilistic models, etc.
My take all along has been that something about evolution has caused it to reliably make the world a more complicated, more interesting, and better place; and evolution, with randomness, is the only process that can be trusted to continue this. Any attempt to control and direct the course of change will just lock in the values of the controller.
I see E’s story about the moties as being one possible source of his bias against evolution, and hence against randomness.
Any attempt to control and direct the course of change will just lock in the values of the controller.
Exactly. This should be obviously what we need to do.
.....
Evolution is blindly optimizing for those that produce more offspring. Eventually, those specifically aiming for this would do this more optimally than those who didn’t. Meaning that eventually only those whose main goal is to mate would dominate. Evolution marches on.
Why this has not happened before is related to the fact that there has not been human level, scheming animals on this planet earlier. Animals that can’t plan years ahead would benefit very little from having an urge towards fitness maximizing. Adaptions to be executed are what needs to be optimized and what matters vastly more on that level.
My assumption is that it isn’t really possible to take charge of evolution. You might be able to have less undirected biological evolution, but only by having memetically-driven evolution. Things are still going to have random influences.
This is an interesting and important paragraph; and it explains some things about Eliezer’s views. It’s important enough to justify. But I don’t see evidence for the idea that evolution gets more oppressive as time passes. Is this a trend in historical data? No; organisms acquire more degrees of freedom as they become more complex.
The unspoken assumption is that organisms continue to evolve, yet don’t increase in complexity—imagining humans to continue to evolve, yet without passing beyond the human stage. Perhaps moties would be the result. We see here in the US that evolution very rapidly rewards cultures and religions that forbid birth control and/or encourage large families.
On the other hand, these cultures’ and religions’ growth in number of humans does not result in an equal growth in money and power and control of resources.
I don’t have an answer; but this idea, almost skipped over, that evolution will inevitably lead to bad things, is a powerful motivator of FAI, CEV, and all such take-over-the-universe schemes. So it needs much more explication than a one-sentence reference to a Niven novel.
The question is indeed interesting, but the presumed answer is a powerful motivator for whom? Even if human evolution will lead to a super-amazing future of greatness, I doubt that future would be as super-amazing as a correctly implemented FAI; avoiding dystopian evolutionary existential catastrophes has never been listed as main reason for wanting to build a friendly really powerful optimization process by anyone I’ve talked to. Most don’t think humanity will even get that far.
But I’m curious as to what your intuitions are regarding the probably counterfactual world where humans continue evolving for a long, long time.
Eliezer has a bias against evolution, and a bias against randomness, as exhibited in his series ending in Worse than Random, which is factually correct in the details, but misleading in the real world, as demonstrated by repeated times when his acolytes have used it to attack probabilistic search, probabilistic models, etc.
My take all along has been that something about evolution has caused it to reliably make the world a more complicated, more interesting, and better place; and evolution, with randomness, is the only process that can be trusted to continue this. Any attempt to control and direct the course of change will just lock in the values of the controller.
I see E’s story about the moties as being one possible source of his bias against evolution, and hence against randomness.
Exactly. This should be obviously what we need to do.
.....
Evolution is blindly optimizing for those that produce more offspring. Eventually, those specifically aiming for this would do this more optimally than those who didn’t. Meaning that eventually only those whose main goal is to mate would dominate. Evolution marches on.
Why this has not happened before is related to the fact that there has not been human level, scheming animals on this planet earlier. Animals that can’t plan years ahead would benefit very little from having an urge towards fitness maximizing. Adaptions to be executed are what needs to be optimized and what matters vastly more on that level.
My assumption is that it isn’t really possible to take charge of evolution. You might be able to have less undirected biological evolution, but only by having memetically-driven evolution. Things are still going to have random influences.