4 ms·

I, as a human (more generally, as a living thing), was purpose-built to maximize my inclusive genetic fitness. And yet, I have just the one child and no particu

by gjm11 4y ago

I, as a human (more generally, as a living thing), was purpose-built to maximize my inclusive genetic fitness. And yet, I have just the one child and no particular wish for more, and I do many things that in no way increase my expected number of descendants and (suitably weighted) other close relations.

TuringTest 4y ago
You were not purposely-built to maximize your genetics. You just happen to be a member of a population that happened to outnumber other populations with different genetics. "Purpose" is something we project onto the world, not something that nature possesses.
- gjm11 4y ago
  I don't think the difference between "conscious being with a purpose" and "oblivious but powerful optimization process" is important here. (Maybe it is? A human engineer trying to design something that maximizes its inclusive genetic fitness might make it do so more explicitly. Maybe that would produce things that are better about doing it in practice than we are. But "evolution is smarter than you are" and I think we would have trouble actually doing better than evolution by designing deliberate fitness-maximizers. After all, our present best attempts in the direction of making machines smart enough to survive in the world have largely given up on trying to program particular goals and purposes into them directly!)
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Evolution took over five hundred million years to get from first brain to human brains. I'd say AI research is doing pretty well.
    - gjm11 4y ago
      I agree, it's doing spectacularly well. My point isn't "AI research is doing badly", it's "we should probably expect AI systems not to be perfectly effective optimizers of the things we try to build them to optimize; we may try to design them to do X but that doesn't necessarily mean they will actually do X, any more than we consistently do the things evolution has tried to design us to do".

by gjm11 4y ago

TuringTest 4y ago

You were not purposely-built to maximize your genetics. You just happen to be a member of a population that happened to outnumber other populations with different genetics. "Purpose" is something we project onto the world, not something that nature possesses.

gjm11 4y ago
I don't think the difference between "conscious being with a purpose" and "oblivious but powerful optimization process" is important here. (Maybe it is? A human engineer trying to design something that maximizes its inclusive genetic fitness might make it do so more explicitly. Maybe that would produce things that are better about doing it in practice than we are. But "evolution is smarter than you are" and I think we would have trouble actually doing better than evolution by designing deliberate fitness-maximizers. After all, our present best attempts in the direction of making machines smart enough to survive in the world have largely given up on trying to program particular goals and purposes into them directly!)
- thfuran 4y ago
  Evolution took over five hundred million years to get from first brain to human brains. I'd say AI research is doing pretty well.
  - gjm11 4y ago
    I agree, it's doing spectacularly well. My point isn't "AI research is doing badly", it's "we should probably expect AI systems not to be perfectly effective optimizers of the things we try to build them to optimize; we may try to design them to do X but that doesn't necessarily mean they will actually do X, any more than we consistently do the things evolution has tried to design us to do".