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Comment by ms1 | Hacker News Reader

I think, in really broad terms, in order to get AGI actually we would need to do better than nature.

If our metric is (intelligence)/(joule), nature seems pretty bad at a first glance: it took many trillions of lifetimes to achieve "general intelligence" *

But then again, on the big stuff like this, have we ever really beat nature? That asterisk is there because, sure, turning the earth's biosphere into computers would make us smarter, but... are we sure?

(And also: human = general?)

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Nature has a massive incentive to make good use of energy from light through photosynthesis. Billions of plants compete, and whoever can get most out of the sun will win out.

Yet manmade solar cells are more efficient by nearly all measures.

Except that manmade solar cells are pretty bad at repairing or replicating themselves.

Or growing out of literally nothing but dirt and water.

And air. That's what is crazy about plants, their carbon comes from the CO2 in the air.

Also if someone loses weight, most of the carbon that made up their fat leaves the body as breath.

and are inedible

and are a damned eye-sore

The solar cells get some organic life form to assist in their reproduction phase. That's pretty efficient too.

> Yet manmade solar cells are more efficient by nearly all measures.

Only because we cheated, though: Houses can't sponantously grow more cells in place when more energy is needed.

On a half-jokingly note, they can, their humans buy them and put them where needed. An alien observer in space would see some houses spontaneously growing solar cells on their roofs.

This is even more interesting if you think of all human artifacts as being equivalent to anthills and beaver dams.

1) Trees are natural and trees create leaves with a solar efficiency of x

2) Humans are natural and we create solar panels with efficiency x + y

This is Dawkins' idea of "extended phenotype". Normally a gene's phenotype refers to its effects on the body of an individual organism posessing that gene, like hair colour or immune response.

A gene's extended phenotype includes effects external to particular organisms, like nests, deforestation, changes to the chemical makeup of the atmosphere, etc.

Why are these just-so stories believed so much?

Just because plants compete on some limited level doesn’t mean that a particular plant organism “winning” means becoming the most efficient converter of sunlight.

Is everyone’s memory like those people who can remember every detail? Why not? If you’re immediately planning to make up a just-so explanation on the spot that has the requisite but unproven claim about increasing the genetic fitness function, that is the problem with evolutionary explanations. It’s not science if you just make stuff up and give it the same amount of credibility as something that has been tested and proven. You can take any trait and spin stories about why it is the way it is, and then expect somehow that some metric has to be maximized because of your unproven theory.

nature only has an incentive to increase efficiency when that increase in efficiency results in increased chance of producing gene copies.

Nature is full of examples that are 'good enough' while balancing other competing constraints. Evolution doesn't create organisms optimized for efficiency - it creates organisms optimized for reproduction. The two are not always the same.

This comparison with nature is pretty interesting. I think some additional constraints are required though. Otherwise, technically we can produce agi by simply giving birth to humans. If that's not "artificial" enough we can produce them from test tubes

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