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Trying to reproduce human-style decision making in a piece of software is only done as a last resort. It's a small miracle whenever it works. Interestingly, gen

Trying to reproduce human-style decision making in a piece of software is only done as a last resort. It's a small miracle whenever it works. Interestingly, genetic algorithms seem to do more interesting things than neural networks. What does that say about brains vs evolution? > civilization has made reproductive desirability, social cooperation, and parenting ability (all inter-related but nonidentical) the larger selection pressures on human genomes Looking at the people that have the biggest families, it's hard to say what, exactly, is being selected for. They seem to like children. > You would have to be a stupidly, suicidally cancerous civilization to go around converting whole planets into tools. We've been converting the earth into a tool.

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
>We've been converting the earth into a tool. And, look at that, it's killing us. Admittedly, since we've known that overexploiting the Earth's resources would do that for something like 50 years now, I don't so much blame humanity in general as the narrow but powerful subset who decided it was better to overexploit and destroy civilization than to make a bit less money.
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  It's been pretty much essential. Earth's entire land area used to be wilderness. Now a substantial proportion of it is farmland, without which we wouldn't eat. It's a tool for enabling civilization. It hasn't really started killing us yet -- the population is expanding. This civilization may and probably will collapse, like the Romans, but I'm not sure exactly how a civilization could grow exponentially forever, so it's kind of inevitable.