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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Only plants and, IIRC, deep-sea vent equivalent chemovores don't depend on other creatures for food.

All sexual reproduction depends on others.

I assume that if you magically took Darwin to the present age, after you explained what a computer was and what AI was, he'd probably say "huh, I have no idea, this is all so far beyond everything I did in the mid 1800s that I have no idea if the analogy holds or not… by the way, have any of you figured out the mechanism nature uses for storing the information passed on via inheritance? Only we didn't have much of a clue in my time."

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Predators and herbivores kill and eat, fungi decompose. Even plants grow towards sunlight. The LLM sits and hopes someone is paying for the lights to stay on.

When did LLMs gain hope or idle contemplation?

They probably don't have those either, that's just me anthropomorphizing them. Regardless, their autonomy is lacking.

Tilting a solar panel towards the sun isn't exactly rocket science. In fact, this is simple enough I just asked ChatGPT and it spat out some ASCII art for a circuit diagram.

Also: all the other stuff you listed is still dependent on another entity.

What I'm trying to get at is that the AI lacks the ability to exploit these resources.

Life is dependent on either other life or the sun. But a plant can naturally grow its own 'solar panels' and then make more plants. ChatGPT can generate a picture that tells some autonomous agent how to build a solar panel.

ChatGPT isn't the only AI in the world (self driving trucks are one, many others constitute the simpler automated system used in factories that build the aluminium and the silicon and put it together to make a solar cell or a CPU); and even if ChatGPT was the only one, I don't accept that it's ability to create a business plan and investor pitch and convince humans to do that, is any less (at least in the ways that matter here) than an animal hunting for food, or a parasite using its host's assets for its own ends, or indeed most humans.

The most basic parasite still can make more parasites and grow to the extent its biology allows. AIs are more like tools, where their usefulness convinces the makers to make more tools. Is the potter's wheel a parasite, for convincing us Homo Sapiens to sit around gathering clay for thousands of years?

I really don't understand why you think that's a good point, sorry.

Even if I just say "yes it's a tool" (some AI clearly are regardless of whether they all are or any demonstrations of them being able to run economically interesting tasks without intervention), not clear how what you're saying connects with the ideas raised in the article?

"The Darwinian evolution of tools" is a statement that makes little sense because Darwin working with things that were alive - undesigned and capable of reproduction. There may be some similarities, but the processes behind each thing are separate enough to produce very different outcomes.

LLM kill and eat information and energy, some de-compile. Some grow intellectually toward flowing electrons. predators depend on herbivores depend on plants which 'hopes' someone is paying for the lights to stay on.

Your point might just be bias.

I'm biased towards the success animals and plants display in the non silicon realm. Animals like crows can reproduce and spread across various land forms only needing the inputs of food and water. They do not need some other species like humans to build complex machines and then to copy or build them on those machines.

The food crows eat is built by a complex machine: other life.

Life is not a machine. The food crows eat was not built. It grew. Life needs energy, from the sun, but not a designer.

> Life is not a machine

Why does this matter? The dependency on others is present regardless. The crow cannot photosynthesise, it ultimately depends on other entities which do. If we made a vat which produced food electrochemically from PV, that a mechanism is involved neither adds to nor subtracts from the crow. If an AI was transcribed from silicon to a bunch of neurons grown in a petri dish — or even by overriding and rewiring an organic crow brain — it neither adds to nor subtracts from the AI.

(If the AI isn't specially trained to keep the crow alive this will end badly, but that is a separate issue, and one that can be ignored because this is all hypothetical).

It matters in the context of Darwinian evolution. Crows do not design other crows, new crows are born with some mutated traits. And so on for everything else down the food chain. AIs do not mutate and grow, their coders do that for them. Even simple malware has not become independent of coders needing to write new viruses.

Why do you think this?

Darwinian evolution is the process of selection of the fittest over multiple generations where there is some process inducing variations.

The idea and terminology may have originated in biology, but that specific mechanism is one of the standard ways to train the weights and biases in an AI.

They're called, conveniently, evolutionary algorithms.

Dead easy to write, I did one in 30 minutes a decade an a half ago after being annoyed by a young-Earth Baptist creationist preacher in Cambridge city center.

And of course, this is trivially something which ChatGPT can spit out the code for — try it out, see how it works. :)

> Even simple malware has not become independent of coders needing to write new viruses.

They've been doing that for at least long enough for humans born at the same time to be allowed to drink in Texas.

Evolutionary algorithms are 'like' evolution because they have some form of selection pressure.

The incremental improvements of the Wright Brothers airplane was 'like' evolution. The design 'evolved' in response to selection for something that would remain airborne in a wind tunnel, and control well without crashing. The Wright Brothers flying machine evolved in a manner similar to life, so presto: it must be exactly like life in all other aspects! We should fear the day when these airplanes take over the puny humans, because they can travel in the sky at hundreds of miles an hour!

You see how stupid that sounds?

>They've been doing that for at least long enough for humans born at the same time to be allowed to drink in Texas.

There exists self modifying malware. This has not reached the level of malware that can reinvent itself to target new machines and new operating systems versions without prompting and design work from the hacker. If it did, that would be far more impressive than what LLMs are doing.

This is a bad interpretation of the argument. Obviously they meant that other creatures can feed themselves not that they derived their nourishment from light and raw chemicals. Asexual reproduction does not require a partner by definition and would be the default for such a system but even that is beside the point since we control the means required for both.

I disagree, naturally.

So, like most here, I'm a high IQ human.

Drop me on a random point on the planet, I die quickly. Narrow it down to land, I die quickly. Remove deserts and tundra, I die a little slower in most cases, unless I disturb a tiger, lion, bear, snake, boar, elephant, etc. Put me in a temperate woodland, I can at least make shelter, but I don't know which berries are edible, nor how to prepare wild legumes or tubers, I can't hunt (and I'm vegetarian but hypothetical animals don't count), so I'll probably still die fast. Put me in a random town, I might be able to survive on the charity of others until I can learn the language well enough to be vaguely useful and/or leave, but there's still a big risk of dying from not being able to communicate with local doctors when feeling unwell.

We're all heavily dependent on others; intelligence doesn't make us magically immune to that, neither does the absence of independence make us less smart.

A hypothetical AI likewise can still out-compete us in the economy, even in the cases where it remains utterly dependent on us.

It might (probably will) even know the Lotka-Volterra equations, and how much of an analogy they are — obligate carnivores adapted to only a few prey can wipe out their food source and die off in turn, something similar but the economics of having humans willing and able to power the AI — and yet still proceed.

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