The analogy drawn between evolution and artificial intelligence is interesting, yet ultimately deficient in at least one key aspect. Yes, the steps performed b

The analogy drawn between evolution and artificial intelligence is interesting, yet ultimately deficient in at least one key aspect. Yes, the steps performed by a computer are unintelligent, just like mutation and natural selection within evolution. However, unlike the process of life according to evolution, computers are not purposeless or directionless. Computers were designed and imbued with a purpose (computation) by intelligent beings, in contrast to evolution’s “blind watchmaker”. Yes, unintelligent computers can perform intelligent processes (for a particular definition of intelligence). Yet it remains up to intelligent beings to judge the final output produced by computers: whether such output makes sense, is useful, or is true. Even if eventually a computer designed by another computer (or a lineage of computers) manages to pass the most brutal of Turing tests, you can’t get away from the fact that such a computer ultimately owes its direction, purpose, and intelligence to the intelligent beings who put together its oldest ancestor. For an apt analogy between AI and evolution, a computer would need to exist and compute without any involvement from intelligent beings at any point in its existence. That computer would need to develop its direction and processes in absolute, unintelligent independence. We couldn’t develop such a computer ourselves; we’d need to discover it somewhere in the natural world (perhaps lying within a mineral deposit). However, at this point we’d be drawing an analogy between evolution and another form of itself. Circular analogies aren’t very useful. The author writes, “in order to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is.” This is true, but knowledge of arithmetic (or a higher form of reasoning) is required in order to produce such a machine in the first place. At least that’s what we can tell based on the only computers available to us (all of which owe their existence to knowledgeable beings).