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Less fun thought: there's an evolutionary bottleneck which prevents further progress, because the cost/benefit tradeoffs don't favour increasing intelligence mu

Less fun thought: there's an evolutionary bottleneck which prevents further progress, because the cost/benefit tradeoffs don't favour increasing intelligence much beyond the minimum. So most planet-spanning civilisations go extinct, because the competitive patterns of behaviour which drive expansion are too dumb to scale to true planet-spanning sentience and self-awareness.

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
I seriously doubt it, honestly, since humans have anatomical limitations keeping their heads from getting bigger quickly. We have to be able to fit through the birth canal.
- tbrownaw 1y ago
  > We have to be able to fit through the birth canal. Or at least we used to, before the c-section was invented.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
    Indeed, but it hasn’t been around for long enough. We might evolve into birth by c-section, if we assume that humans won’t alter themselves dramatically by technological means over hundreds of thousands of years.
- bcoates 1y ago
  Perfectly ordinary terrestrial mammals like elephants have much, much larger skulls at birth than humans, so it’s clearly a matter of tradeoffs not an absolute limit.
  - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
    Oh of course, but evolution has to work with what it’s got. Humans happened to fit a niche where they might benefit from more intelligence, elephants don’t seemingly fit such a niche.
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
Intelligence is ability to predict (and hence plan), but predictability itself is limited by chaos, so maybe in the end that is the limiting factor. It's easy to imagine a more capable intelligence than our own due to having many more senses, maybe better memory than ourselves, better algorithms for pattern detection and prediction, but by definition you can't be more intelligent than the fundamental predictability of the world in which you are part.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Sounds kind of like the synopsis of the Three Body Problem.
- breuleux 1y ago
  > predictability itself is limited by chaos, so maybe in the end that is the limiting factor I feel much of humanity's effectiveness comes from ablating the complexity of the world to make it more predictable and easier to plan around. Basically, we have certain physical capabilities that can be leveraged to "reorganize" the ecosystem in such a way that it becomes more easily exploitable. That's the main trick. But that's circumstantial and I can't help but think that it's going to revert to the mean at some point. That's because in spite of what we might intuit, the ceiling of non-intelligence is probably higher than the ceiling of intelligence. Intelligence involves matching an intent to an effective plan to execute that intent. It's a pretty specific kind of system and therefore a pretty small section of the solution space. In some situations it's going to be very effective, but what are the odds that the most effective resource consumption machines would happen to be organized just like that?

BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago

I seriously doubt it, honestly, since humans have anatomical limitations keeping their heads from getting bigger quickly. We have to be able to fit through the birth canal.

tbrownaw 1y ago
> We have to be able to fit through the birth canal. Or at least we used to, before the c-section was invented.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Indeed, but it hasn’t been around for long enough. We might evolve into birth by c-section, if we assume that humans won’t alter themselves dramatically by technological means over hundreds of thousands of years.
bcoates 1y ago
Perfectly ordinary terrestrial mammals like elephants have much, much larger skulls at birth than humans, so it’s clearly a matter of tradeoffs not an absolute limit.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Oh of course, but evolution has to work with what it’s got. Humans happened to fit a niche where they might benefit from more intelligence, elephants don’t seemingly fit such a niche.

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

Intelligence is ability to predict (and hence plan), but predictability itself is limited by chaos, so maybe in the end that is the limiting factor. It's easy to imagine a more capable intelligence than our own due to having many more senses, maybe better memory than ourselves, better algorithms for pattern detection and prediction, but by definition you can't be more intelligent than the fundamental predictability of the world in which you are part.

pixl97 1y ago
Sounds kind of like the synopsis of the Three Body Problem.
breuleux 1y ago
> predictability itself is limited by chaos, so maybe in the end that is the limiting factor I feel much of humanity's effectiveness comes from ablating the complexity of the world to make it more predictable and easier to plan around. Basically, we have certain physical capabilities that can be leveraged to "reorganize" the ecosystem in such a way that it becomes more easily exploitable. That's the main trick. But that's circumstantial and I can't help but think that it's going to revert to the mean at some point. That's because in spite of what we might intuit, the ceiling of non-intelligence is probably higher than the ceiling of intelligence. Intelligence involves matching an intent to an effective plan to execute that intent. It's a pretty specific kind of system and therefore a pretty small section of the solution space. In some situations it's going to be very effective, but what are the odds that the most effective resource consumption machines would happen to be organized just like that?