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"Now imagine a giant squid, swimming a kilometer deep within the ocean. Likely they are also intelligent but we can hardly leverage this for anything useful."
by V-2 10y ago
"Now imagine a giant squid, swimming a kilometer deep within the ocean. Likely they are also intelligent but we can hardly leverage this for anything useful."
As a matter of fact, not that likely, because if it's not useful for anything then where's the selection pressure for maintaining this level of intelligence?
A complex nervous system doesn't come for free, it's quite costly, that's why it's not uncommon for it to atrophy over the course of evolution: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150424-animals-that-lost-their-brains http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150424-animals-that-lost-th...
- idlewords 10y agoDid... did you just deduce that giant squid are not intelligent from first principles?
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoConfused: they are intelligent, we cannot leverage that. I imagine the giant squid has lots of use for its intelligence, navigating a 3D universe filled with threats.
- arethuza 10y agoKen MacLeod has SF books (the Engines of Light trilogy) where giant squids are the only creatures capable of navigating starships: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_MacLeod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_MacLeod
- jjallen 10y agoWhy evolve something in the first place if it's so costly but is unbeneficial? The only reason I can think of is massive environment change from the one that selected the intelligence in the first place. But for oceans, something tells me they've been mostly the same, at least relative to land locations on the Earth.
- V-2 10y agoYes I think so to. We were poorly adapted to our environment (which suddenly changed as we had to leave trees etc.). This meant our best shot at survival was to hunt in packs. And that, in turn, made it crucial that we're able to communicate and coordinate our efforts with other members of our species. Thus language was born, and related centers in our brains started growing, because those who lagged behind in this aspect, didn't get to eat (that much). So yeah we needed to be poorly adapted to the environment in the first place for intelligence to become a gamechanger. Note that animals such as shark or crocodile haven't changed much at all over the course of millions of years. They didn't have to - they're already a near-perfect match for their environments. We paid a dear price for that: high maternal death rates (those big heads...), very long childhood, and so on. And indeed it never guaranteed our survival, let alone this current super-predator status. Other human species went extinct. There's a theory that we were on the brink of extinctions ourselves, and we made it by the skin of our teeth really: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Genetic_bottleneck_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Geneti...
- V-2 10y agoThis leads me to a funny thought that the best chance of evolving an AI would be through putting it in a very hostile, virtual environment where it's preyed upon by dumber AIs
- dsacco 10y agoSo kind of like generative adversarial neural networks, where the discriminator and generator are modelled as predator and prey respectively playing against each other.
- zardo 10y agoDan Simmons had the same idea. AI has evolved from Core War in one of his novels. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War
- pas 10y ago
- rm445 10y agoI think you mistook the direction of that sentence slightly. I don't think there's much information around about giant squid, but it's likely that they're intelligent (by animal standards) because other squid are intelligent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence By my interpretation of the sentence, the author isn't necessarily assuming intelligence from first principles in quite the same way as you did in the opposite sense.