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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

It's much easier to make a plane that can fly than to emulate the particular way a bird flies.

They'll both solve the flight problem, so it doesn't really matter.

Flight is something extremely comparible to ai development. When it was developed, many companies were trying, and a lot of people said it was impossible. The problem space is also similar. We're not sure how to get there exactly but we may be close.

It was, in the end made to happen by an unlikely pair - not a large company with a lot of investment. I believe this might be that fate, too.

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It matters tremendously. Think about the economics of bird flight vs. plane flight. Why is it that flight has been around for almost 100 years now and yet we still aren't flying everywhere? The reality is we can always come up with subpar ways of doing things, but there's a reason birds have evolved as they are today that we just can't replicate ourselves. We mastered long haul rapid flights, but bird flight generalizes much better. They might be slower in long haul, but they are much better and short haul and medium haul and have evolved to work in groups to make long haul possible. So yes, analogously we can create intelligence in a different way, which we are, but it likely won't generalize as well.

If we could reduce the density of a person by about an order of magnitude we can start replicating bird flight on a per-person basis. Our approaches to flight are constrained in all forms by the desire to put really heavy things into the air.

Look no further than drones that can operate for quite a long while, move in any dimension fairly well, and manage some pretty ridiculous speeds for not being designed to do so all because their purpose is not to carry large complicated amounts of weight.

The difference is we knew what flight was and had an easily visible and verifiable goal that was obvious to all when it was achieved. What is intelligence? How do you measure it? How will we know once we have created? We haven't even defined the problem yet, how can we know when we have achieved it?

> in the end made to happen by an unlikely pair

Who spent years studying birds...

No, the wings of the wright flyer don't flap, but that doesn't mean it wasn't designed based on birds. One key piece (controllability) came as a result of the wright brothers studying how birds adjusted the shape of their wings.

Question is, are the current approaches at AI the equivalent of the early flappy wing planes we were building to emulate birds?

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