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Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

> Biology would suggest that it doesn't take $100 million worth of GPUs and exaflops of compute to achieve the intelligence of a human.

Biology suggests that a self-replicating machine can exist by ingesting other machines, turning them into energy and then using that energy to power themselves. Biology suggests that these machines can be so small that we cannot even see them.

How close are we to making one of those?

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I believe that synthetic biology had succeeded already a few years ago in making artificial cells with a fully synthetic genome designed by us with what is sufficient for the cell to eat, grow and replicate, se we already can design and make such 'machines'.

So make a biological AI then. What the parent was saying is that 'biology can do it with organic materials, so we should be able to do it with electronics".

There's nothing obviously wrong with assuming that "biology can do it with organic materials, so we should be able to do it with electronics" - while it's theoretically possible that we'll eventually identify some fundamental obstacle preventing that, as far as we currently know, computation is universal and the only thing that depends on the substrate is efficiency.

Since we have a much, much better industrial process for manufacturing electronic components, why attempt to make a biological AI if there's no current reason to believe that it being biological is somehow necessary or even beneficial?

I love it when people completely pivot what they say just to keep arguing.

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