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Comment by wudangmonk | Hacker News Reader

You mean the average brain with about 100 billion neurons with about 1000 connections each bringing it to around 100 trillion connections. With an estimated 1000 "AI" neurons required per biologial neuron.

I don't think you are givin these "below average" intelligence individuals enough credit. What we consider a genius is the equivalent of a dog show obstacle course. We measure intelligence/genius as whatever is hard for humans and completely ignore what is easy because we fail to see the complexity behind the easy stuff.

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Nobody said that nature is optimal. Wheels are trivial, however not present in biology. Nature creates tentacles, not jet engines, nuclear energy etc.

Majority of human brain computation is spent on things that are simply not necessary for computer models (how to wiggle limbs, mouth, eyes etc).

Current LLM are impressive, but we know they can be much more efficient - we're using very low quality training data, we don't use any methods to question training input/evaluate it against current knowledge etc. Our current language models are based on reciting/memorization/force-feeding, not true learning.

Computer models have massive underlying advantage of working on CPU/GPUs where they can be modeled, cloned, retrained, have binary accuracy, can integrate with specialized code instantly, have access to massive memory storage, they are insanely fast and precise etc.

Looking at it from first principles, there is no reason to think that near optimal runtime should not be more efficient than human brain on currently available computers.

We don't need to simulate full brain just like we didn't have to create super fancy legs to go to the Moon.

> Nobody said that nature is optimal. Wheels are trivial, however not present in biology. Nature creates tentacles, not jet engines, nuclear energy etc.

Wheels are trivial but useless without bearings.

Bearings most certainly aren't trivial. All the things you listed further are dependent on bearings somewhere.

I think 5yo kid with lego would have problems agreeing with this otherwise moot statement.

Don't want to sound mean but I don't think you've dealt with bearings if you say so.

AFAIK both exist in biology. Bacterial flagellum is effectively a motor, and has a working wheel-like structure. IIRC, some crickets had an equivalent of a bearing somewhere in their anatomy too.

Evolution is a greedy, lazy optimizer, so it promotes things that work a-ok for a given environment.

It's also worth noting that wheels alone are not too useful for transportation, as they're only half of the picture. The other half is roads. That is, because we couldn't (and mostly still can't) figure out all-terrain mobility systems that could navigate diverse environments, we cheated and locally flattened the environment, to reduce the problem to that solvable by a humble wheel. Evolution can't cheat like this.

I actually googled before writing the comment (preposterous, I know; also, out of vouge, should've asked chatgpt) and the bacteria thing was the only thing I found, nothing macro scale, which made sense since it's easier to rebuild than to heal. Anything bigger than that would have to be healed and it's hard enough to fix mechanical bearings, can't imagine how to regrow or heal one even if it somehow grows. Maybe it's an issue with my imagination ;)

Good point about rebuilding vs. healing. We're kind of rediscovering it with economies of scale and price of labor making it much cheaper to replace things than to repair them.

I can imagine evolution creating macro-scale wheels that can be healed, and/or able to survive long enough before failing to be advantageous - after all, bones and teeth can hardly be healed if badly damaged, and yet they last long enough to stick around as core design elements.

This is why I mentioned roads. Whether or not evolution could iterate its way to macroscale wheels, it wouldn't, because they'd be useless without roads. Legs may be more complex overall, but they're an all-terrain solution that can be incrementally improved, and every improvement step grants improved survivability.

If that's the case why are we sending wheeled rovers to mars/moon and not something with legs?

In any case this discussion is going sideways, the point is that nature doesn't have monopoly on being optimal. This also applies to intelligence/learning/modeling something better than brain.

> If that's the case why are we sending wheeled rovers to mars/moon and not something with legs?

Because Mars is a simple and boring environment. Most of its surface, and especially the parts we target with rover missions, are effectively flat sheets peppered with rocks - a decent set of wheels and suspension is close to optimal for navigating such terrain.

Now, if we were to send missions to a planet that's mostly forests and rivers, like Earth used to be, then wheels wouldn't cut it - not before cutting down some of the forests first.

> the point is that nature doesn't have monopoly on being optimal. This also applies to intelligence/learning/modeling something better than brain.

Fair enough. Nature doesn't do globally optimal - but it makes things heavily optimized for their environment. That's why our planes are nowhere near as energy-efficient in flying as birds are, but birds cannot travel as far and as fast as our planes can.

Exactly, same with intelligence - it's polluted with emotions and all kind of "nonsense" - but it doesn't have to. We can create emotionless, super-intelligent machines exceeding human capability by far (and use them as hammers). No need to imitate every detail of the brain to extract intelligence.

The counter to this is you can end up with an exceptionally powerful, but unaligned AI, which presents a new series of 'known unknowns' and 'unknown unknowns' that we have to deal with.

Yes, possibly. Simple example would be an army robot that is extermely efficient human killer that upps-escaped.

Original argument was around optimising on intelligence and that biology doesn't hold best-possible trophy on it.

We don't need to match number of neural connections in human brain to exceed its intelligence.

> We don't need to match number of neural connections in human brain to exceed its intelligence.

That's also true because of wheels/road thing, in that we can "cheat" here too. More specifically, some of the neural connections in the human brain are dedicated to sensing, processing and controlling the dynamic state of human body. Purely-software AIs don't need those for intelligence.

Legged-robot technology is still very immature, even more so when the rover was designed. Wheels work well on relatively flat Martian terrain and are a lot less likely to break than robot legs.

Interestingly the latest Mars rover also includes a small helicopter, another technology which requires spinning something on a bearing and does not commonly exist in nature.

They've found gears in insects too

https://www.livescience.com/39577-insects-with-leg-gears-dis...

"Wheels are trivial but useless without bearings."

Carts, chariots, and wheelbarrows (to name but a few examples) have been useful for thousands of years without bearings.

The simplest bearing is a greased axle. This was the big 'wheel' discovery, not the round thingie, but how to attach a box on top. So we agree!

> but useless without bearings.

Or more importantly - level ground.

> Wheels are trivial, however not present in biology.

Because roads don't exist in nature..... imagine trying to out run a predator if you just had wheels but no roads.

> Nature creates tentacles, not jet engines, nuclear energy etc

Under water I think you'll find there is jet propulsion.

Plants and animals are powered by nuclear energy - the remote fusion reaction is in the sky. Why have an internal nuclear reactor - fissile material is quite rare and fusion is quite hard to contain.

Human's are overly fond of their own children ( machines ) but fail to see the complexity of life. People are in awe of the latest Boston Dynamics robot - wow it can run - wow if can leap - and but don't post pictures of horses or gymnasts.

> People [...] don't post pictures of horses or gymnasts.

But that's just because the internet is already filled with cats

> Under water I think you'll find there is jet propulsion.

Technically, yes, but most people are going to be thinking of the spinning turbines of doom with the absurdly hot fire in the middle, and that isn't.

You're right and missing main point at the same time.

The reasons why biology didn't evolve what we discovered don't matter.

What matters is that it didn't, yet they can exist and outperform.

Similarly brain is not an upper ceiling for intelligence.

We can create more intelligent machines than us.

Things like energy efficiency don't matter as much - when we run large models, nobody cares that it may require more energy than two sandwiches and a beer per day. We do care about energy efficiency but not at scales of biology.

The lack of efficiency in the brain is a trade off for adaptability. There's no doubt that we can transmit signals faster than neurons can fire but the cost is drastically reduced adaptation. There are micro, meso, and macroscopic networks in the brain that have different degrees of "adaptability". This isn't even considering the variety in neurons or the additional signalling cascades by non neuronal tissue. How does all of this contribute to intelligence? We don't know exactly but much of this has survived millions of years of evolution in many animals so it probably has some role.

That's not to say we can't do this with computers and less computational power. However, it's really improbable that a couple layers of adaptability on an artificial neuron network will be anywhere near sufficient to simulate intelligence in even a rodent.

There are a few counters I have to this and one would be that AI could still end up 'smarter' than us, but have no innate desire to survive. The paperclip maximizer scenarios are an example of this. AI could very well create a highly destructive scenario not only for humans, but also itself because it is "intelligent" but not "aligned" with the idea of survival and evolution.

I erased a lengthy response I was writing because I think our sentiments may actually align. In short, I'm about as certain that these computers aren't going to achieve intelligence in my lifetime as I'm certain that the world is round. But none of that means these models aren't dangerous. Misinformation and accelerating backdoor access to network infrastructures are a couple that we are already see happening.

Not relevant and not simply picking apart your example but I’ve been nerd sniped:

Wheels are not trivial in a biological sense. Topologically most life is either a tube or a cup depending on digestive systems. Wheels are separated from the body, which would be difficult for base cell division to produce.

Some animals like the pangolin are round shaped and do roll, but it just seems non optimal.

I’d say it’s curious nature hasn’t produced more creates that like making wheels like the dung beetle does, but nature made us and we do like making wheels.

Listing the number of neurons in a brain has very little to do with these systems, so it's pretty meaningless. Also, the number of neurons in Wernicke's area and the PFC is quite a small fraction of the brain, making this even more meaningless.

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