Thank you for sharing! I actually had someone link the same article on my blog, very interesting read—and certainly spoke to the power of the annealing process / analogy :)
meanderingmoose
Karma: 35
Examining Evolution as an Upper Bound for AGI Timelines
On Meaning and Machines
Thank you! That analogy makes a lot of sense to me—it’s almost like complex systems settle into a “low energy” state over time, which makes large scale change difficult within that settled state. Reinvention / disruption / destruction could be viewed as “turning up the temperature” and providing a reset of sorts which allows for more broad changes (with the system then gradually “cooling” to a “low energy” state after the reset). Hadn’t thought about annealing in that context before, thanks for sharing :)
Also, based on that connection, think you might enjoy another post I recently wrote which uses Conway’s Game of Life as an analogy to understand the difficulties associated with changing complex systems.
Thank you, glad you found it a useful read!
The Power of Annealing
Thanks, I appreciate that feedback. I agree with you that there was no clear main point, and I think the AGI part assumes a different type of architecture than what is used today, which as you point out makes it difficult to situate the ideas. I’ll put some thought in and see if I can come up with a better way to frame it.
Wikipedia has a number of examples (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child), though to be transparent I haven’t done much research on the level of documentation of each.
Makes sense—appreciate the feedback!