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Comment by Isinlor | Hacker News Reader

We empirically do not need AGI for computational/intelligence explosion.

Biological viruses like SARS-Cov-2 are relatively simple programs ~30kb that optimize themselves.

Single virus has no chance of out computing and evading an immune system, but billions of billions of viruses can out compute and evade even human civilization as a whole.

And that's still just a spoonful of matter limited by Earth organisms availability.

A self-replicating spacecraft does not need to be limited by Earthly constraints.

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Viruses can't do anything without an ecosystem of hosts to parasitise.

It's the ecosystem that's doing the computation, not the virus.

From that POV we already have AGI. We're just not aware of it. And it's not particularly sentient yet.

Good point. We provide the ecosystem and corporations are the parasite. Companies are doing lots of things no human could begin to imagine doing on his own. We can try resist the will of our employer but it may simply replace us. It is obvious who is wearing the pants.

> corporations are the parasite

Corporations aren't parasites. If you have to think of corporations as living entities, then humans are living in a symbiotic relationship with them: Humans provide them with labor, and in turn they provide products which are consumed by humans.

Increasingly is seems like corporations are providing products to other corporations, and the number of humans involves is dropping.

Thus the increasing divide between the 1% and the 99%, stock markets hitting all time highs, while ever more people worry about basic necessities and even the most basic employment.

A simple virus has abilities that no "computer" has ever demonstrated.

For example, the ability to reproduce and optimize it's own programming for survival and expansion.

I know we're not on good terms with them, but man are viruses cool and fascinating.

Bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) are particularly interesting, because we might be able to use them as targeted antibiotics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg

Not an expert but I'd be surprised if some modern computer viruses don't have some dynamic adaptability of their obfuscation to evade antivirus programs.

They probably do --- within the strict limits and confines of logic provided by the programmer. A computer virus has no ability to change or adapt beyond these rigid bounds without being re-programmed with new logic.

But a biological virus can change and adapt to new situations and environments all on it's own --- with new logic of it's own design. You could easily argue that a simple biological virus is more "intelligent".

I don't know... Are the confines of nature, i.e. physical law, and the confines of programming that different in the end? The search space may be larger and thus it makes sense to use a different optimization strategy, but in the end both cases just follow a relatively simple program to achieve their goal.

The obvious difference is that a simple biological virus is arguably much more effective at exploring it's environment and adapting to it in order to survive, grow and expand.

The difference is not only of quality, but quantity.

Computing power that biological platforms provide are quite huge.

Each infected person carries 1e9 - 1e11 virions during peak infection [0]. If there are 1 million (1e6) infected people right now then we have around 1e15 - 1e17 virons. With a viron size of 32kb and 8h replication time [1] we get speed of ~10 bits/s or very roughly 1 FLOPS per viron.

That gives us computing power used for virus replication between 1 petaFLOPS to 100 petaFLOPS. The number is probably an underestimate because 1 viron probably needs to produce 1000 or more copies to maintain replication rate of 1. The upper bound then would be 100 exaFLOPS.

That's in the range of TOP500 supercomputers (1.3 petaFLOPS - 442 petaFLOPS) [2].

The sum of all TOP500 supercomputers is 2.4 exaFLOPS, so some 40 times less than the upper bound on the virus of 100 exaFLOPS.

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.16.20232009v...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7224694/

[2] https://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/

So in other words; by your math, all the supercomputers in the world are not enough to replicate the "intelligence" of a simple biological virus --- which is technically not even alive.

Replicating "intelligence" that is alive is probably a trillion times more difficult.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think you just made an argument for "Why Computers (as we know them) Won't Make Themselves Smarter".

Just yesterday [0] I also did an upper bound estimate on computing power of a human brain based on assumption that brains carry out irreversible computations. E.g. inputs of an AND gate can not be recovered from the gate output. This forces increase of entropy. This is known as Landauer's principle or Landauer's limit [1].

The Landauer's limit suggests that a brain consuming 20W at 36C can carry out no more than ~1e22 irreversible operations per second (20W / (309.2K * Boltzmann constant * ln(2))).

That bounds brains at ~1e21 FLOP/s (~10 bits erased per FLOP). The best supercomputer right now does ~4e17 FLOP/s.

That's log2(1e21 / 4e17) ~11 doublings of computing power until supercomputers will be faster than thermodynamic maximum of FLOPS power of brains.

Assuming we keep up the doubling time below 3 years, we will have supercomputers faster than a human brain in up to 3 * 11 ~ 33 years.

And at that rate we will need another log2(1000^3) ~ 30 doublings to reach humanity brains computational power, so up to another 90 years.

Overall, I don't see a reason why not to use biological platform for general type computations. If we are able to grow muscle tissue in a lab on an industrial scale, then we should be able to learn how to grow neurons in a lab on an industrial scale. Apparently neurons are a lot more difficult to grow, but it's still perfectly doable [2]. The issue is that we don't know how to grow them so that they do useful computation. But I can easily imagine that AWS and competition will be selling access to teachable biological neurons in the mid term future e.g. in 30 years.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26623730

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2YDApNRK3g

A virus is DNA encapsulated in proteins. DNA is nothing more than information and the encapsulating proteins a medium to infect a host. Think of it as a small program on a USB drive. It does not compute nor reproduce by itself, only thanks to a host system.

As for optimization, it is a pure random walk.

You've re-stated the problem but you haven't changed the facts.

We have yet to build a computer program that can adapt and "learn" and grow as effectively or as efficiently as a simple biological virus. In other words, a virus; which is technically not even alive, is closer to being "intelligent" than anything AI has yet produced. Never mind intelligence that is alive.

Again it is a pure random walk, only parallelized on a large number of nodes, and run for a very long time: basically since the beginning of life.

I would not describe this process as efficient. It has no memory: mutations could be randomly done and undone. A huge majority of mutations lead to non viable viruses, still keep occurring again and again. Of course it successfully adapts to changing conditions, but without that that would not even be an optimization algorithm. Given huge resources we would have no difficulty simulating such a process. At a smaller scale it has inspired genetic algorithms and a large family of stochastic algorithms, which had to be carefully refined to become useful. We do not have the same resources and the same patience as Mother Nature.

We do not have the same resources and the same patience as Mother Nature.

Exactly!

Overall, Mother Nature is actually pretty resource efficient.

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