You do not, in fact, get general intelligence by accident by throwing a lot of connections in one place, just like you do not get a human just by throwing a lot of organic molecules and water in one place.
So it is possible that we reach AI just by randomly permuting connections and weights. Of course it's more likely we intelligently set (or "evolve") these connections and weights, but this allows us to set an upper bound on computation/time needed.
I don't think this was the case. Yes there is evolution but it is not random. Actually most of the molecules sitting around did not evolve to intelligence. In case our evolution we had natural selection. In case of AI we have artificial selection (selection made by humans) and even if we consider ourselves smart enough to do this we cannot prove that we are able to make it happen (choosing the correct AIs/algorithms to survive) until it happens. Maybe I cannot express this clear enough but the advantage natural evolution has over artificial evolution is the huge number of "experiments" - meaning it had time enough to do a lot of small changes until something worked.
I think you have that backwards; natural evolution is absurdly slow because it takes a very long time to cycle through generations of animals whereas genetic programming on a computer to evolve algorithms can happen billions of times a day because computers are much faster at cycling through possibilities.
> meaning it had time enough to do a lot of small changes until something worked.
Computers can do it faster.
And I agree with you that AI can be much faster.
I still think the artificial selection can be influence by us - humans - so we might add flows in the sistem from the beginning. Of course AI can learn to identify them maybe. But maybe not. Like in the case when looking from inside a system one cannot see how the system really is so it cannot fix it.
Of course what I say are just some hypothesis, nothing proven and I think they cannot yet be falsifiable.
Well, not unless you have a couple billion years to sit around.
And, there's a least some evidence that it's even worse than that -- intelligence does not appear to be common in the universe. So it might well be a couple of billion years * a million planets worth of organic molecules and water (or a hundred million planets. Or a billion planets).
Don't tell that to the deep learning cult! They'll have to think about how it all works!
I have not met any actual deep learning researchers who think they are creating AGI. I think that it's non-experts who write about deep learning research who think that deep learning is creating AGI.
And I'm not even sure I would call it "parameter fitting". I'd call it, "continuous circuit searching via gradient descent", because that's all you're doing: searching for a nice analog circuit for your task within a large, continuous space of such circuits.
Unless intelligence itself conforms to natural principles, unless it "cuts with the grain" of nature's preexisting laws.
Which, frankly, it does. Information theory and thermodynamics are a thing.