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Comment by darkmighty | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely agree.

Take this assertion from the article: "But it would be looking for patterns that are already existent. It wouldn’t be able to find that new thing that was totally out of left field. That’s what I think of as creativity—somebody comes up with something really new and clever." -- I find this disingenuous. Creativity is just the outcome of our particular experiences, it's a way to parse our hundreds of thousands of hours of experience we get even at an early age into a new combination. There's no small algorithm that without a mountain of data ("experience") will generate clever insights from simple requests.

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To say nothing of the fact that billions of years of evolution imparts a large set of choices made for us. It didn't take 16 years to get a teenage virtuoso violinist, it took 3 billion years of evolution.

It's absolutely fantastic that < 100 years of purposeful hardware research and < 1 year of training can compete with 3 billion years of meandering hardware building and 16 years of training, to the point that the latter feels the need to insist that the former will never be as good.

Given our current trajectory, it wouldn't be shocking if at 150-200 years of hardware research and with <5 years of training, the intentionally created thing surpassed the evolved one.

Ed: I rolled software in with hardware.

> It's absolutely fantastic that < 100 years of purposeful hardware research and < 1 year of training can compete with 3 billion years of meandering hardware building and 16 years of training, to the point that the latter feels the need to insist that the former will never be as good.

The 3 billion years of evolution are still at the foundation of computer research. It's not like computers are spontaneously appearing out of thin vacuum via quantum fluctuations.

but computer like structures do pop up in incredibly simple situations. seashells for instance.

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