Cool. :) Not sure how well this came across in the post but I was trying to be careful to say that even though there is a tendency for intelligence to arise (it

Cool. :) Not sure how well this came across in the post but I was trying to be careful to say that even though there is a tendency for intelligence to arise (it is really more that evolution tends to accelerate its own rate of adaptation over time, for the reasons I gave in the post, and intelligence is the eventual result), whether that tendency plays out for a particular run of the tape may depend on many things. As an analogy, think of the long term trends of evolution like the force of a river, and the biosphere’s evolution like a pebble in that river. Maybe the pebble will be carried a great distance in the direction of flow, or maybe it will get stuck someplace at the bottom of the river for a million years. In that sense, pointing to the historical record of evolution is misleading and too much detail — IMO you have to distill evolution to some computational essence in order to reason about whether it has any long term trends. Something that I don’t think is well known is how likely it is that evolution will get stuck or reach equilibrium (how often will the pebble get stuck), but I think it’s wrong to say there is no long term tendency. Also see this other post which talks more about this, see the Getting Stuck section - https://pchiusano.github.io/2018-04-14/intelligence.html https://pchiusano.github.io/2018-04-14/intelligence.html