You need all of this information plus knowledge of the various interactions of the different environments to pursue Kurzweil's approach. Absolutely, and this i

You need all of this information plus knowledge of the various interactions of the different environments to pursue Kurzweil's approach. Absolutely, and this is one reason why I think Kurzweil's approach overall is pretty foolish. But I do think that his information-content claim is within the bounds of reason (I've explained my stance on that many other places in this thread, the gist is that it's highly unlikely that the whole developmental process supplies a huge amount of information "for free", in the same sense that it's unlikely that you'll achieve a 10x compression in code size by using Python instead of Ruby to write a program) and it at least tells us that a solution to the problem of intelligence does exist that doesn't require (for instance) explicit hard-coding of every neural connection inside a brain. In fact, it requires massively less information to specify than that, so there's some hope that in the end we'll be able to come away with reasonable approximations to that algorithm since it must be "fairly simple" (meaning: more complicated than anything we've tackled before, but maybe still within the realm of possibility). That hints at the fact that AI researchers (at least those that don't buy Kurzweil's ridiculous "simulate-the-whole-thing!" approach) should be looking more into building out small "genomes" into massive structures rather than focusing too much on individual explicitly specified processing networks, because nature is clearly doing something like that, and it seems to work pretty well, letting it achieve a remarkably compact solution, given that evolution tends to produce very bloated code as a rule. There has been tentative research along these lines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNEAT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNEAT, for example), but there needs to be more, particularly to figure out what sorts of things we actually want these massive structures to do, what sorts of processes we should be focusing on to control that building process, what types of units we need in order to make the processing that we're doing feasible, etc.