3 ms·

Why 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 s

by jjallen 10y ago

Why 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 ago
Yes 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 ago
  This 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 ago
    So 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 ago
    Dan 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
    That's already what happens in training a machine learning system. You start with a very dumb network (all weights 0, or random) and try it, it gives you something bloody stupid, you adjust the weights, and try again. Basically you kill all the possible networks that are not good enough. Hostile as fuck. AlphaGo played against itself. Neural network based game AIs train against each other. ( https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/06/meet-the-computer-thats-learning-to-kill-and-the-man-who-progra/ https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/06/meet-the-computer-thats-... and https://exodusesports.com/guides/building-your-own-planetary-annihilation-ai/ https://exodusesports.com/guides/building-your-own-planetary... )

by jjallen 10y ago

V-2 10y ago

Yes 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 ago
This 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 ago
  So 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 ago
  Dan 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
  That's already what happens in training a machine learning system. You start with a very dumb network (all weights 0, or random) and try it, it gives you something bloody stupid, you adjust the weights, and try again. Basically you kill all the possible networks that are not good enough. Hostile as fuck. AlphaGo played against itself. Neural network based game AIs train against each other. ( https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/06/meet-the-computer-thats-learning-to-kill-and-the-man-who-progra/ https://www.engadget.com/2014/06/06/meet-the-computer-thats-... and https://exodusesports.com/guides/building-your-own-planetary-annihilation-ai/ https://exodusesports.com/guides/building-your-own-planetary... )