Now that we clarified up-thread that Eliezer’s position is not that there was a giant algorithmic innovation in between chimps and humans, but rather that there was some innovation in between dinosaurs and some primate or bird that allowed the primate/bird lines to scale better
Where was this clarified...? My Eliezer-model says “There were in fact innovations that arose in the primate and bird lines which allowed the primate and bird lines to scale better, but the primate line still didn’t scale that well, so we should expect to discover algorithmic innovations, if not giant ones, during hominin evolution, and one or more of these was the core of overlapping somethingness that handles chipping handaxes but also generalizes to building spaceships.”
If we’re looking for an innovation in birds and primates, there’s some evidence of ‘hardware’ innovation rather than ‘software.’
For a speculative software innovation hypothesis, there seem to be cognitive adaptations that arose in the LCA of all anthropoids for mid-level visual representations e.g. glossiness, above the level of, say, lines at a particular orientation, and below the level of natural objects, which seem like an easy way to exapt into categories, then just stack more layers for generalization and semantic memory. These probably reduce cost and error by allowing the reliable identification of foraging targets at a distance. There seem to be corresponding cognitive adaptations for auditory representations that strongly correlate with foraging targets, e.g. calls of birds that also target the fruits of angiosperm trees. Maybe birds and primates were under similar selection for mid-level visual representations that easily exapt into categories, etc.
Where was this clarified...? My Eliezer-model says “There were in fact innovations that arose in the primate and bird lines which allowed the primate and bird lines to scale better, but the primate line still didn’t scale that well, so we should expect to discover algorithmic innovations, if not giant ones, during hominin evolution, and one or more of these was the core of overlapping somethingness that handles chipping handaxes but also generalizes to building spaceships.”
For a speculative software innovation hypothesis, there seem to be cognitive adaptations that arose in the LCA of all anthropoids for mid-level visual representations e.g. glossiness, above the level of, say, lines at a particular orientation, and below the level of natural objects, which seem like an easy way to exapt into categories, then just stack more layers for generalization and semantic memory. These probably reduce cost and error by allowing the reliable identification of foraging targets at a distance. There seem to be corresponding cognitive adaptations for auditory representations that strongly correlate with foraging targets, e.g. calls of birds that also target the fruits of angiosperm trees. Maybe birds and primates were under similar selection for mid-level visual representations that easily exapt into categories, etc.