The effort from going from Chimp to Human was marginally lower but still took a huge amount of effort. It was maybe 5 million years since the last common ancestor between Chimps and Humans and taking a generation to be like 20 years that’s at least 250,000 generations of a couple of thousand individuals in a complex environment with lots of processes going on. I haven’t done the math but that seems like a massive amount of computation. To go from human to Von Neumann still takes a huge search process. If we think of every individual human as consisting of evolution trying to get more intelligence there are almost 8 billion instances being ‘tried’ right now in a very complex environment. Granted that if humans were to run this process it may take a lot less time. If say breeding and selection of the most intelligent individuals in every generation was done it may take a lot less time to get human level intelligence if starting from a chimp.
The thing is, it’s not. Evolution is optimizing for the amount of descendants. Nothing more. If being more intelligent is the way forward—nice! If having blue hair results in even more children—even better! Intelligence just happens to be what evolution decided for humans. Daisies happened to come up with liking closely cropped grasslands, which is also currently a very good strategy (lawns). The point is that evolution chooses what to try totally at random, and whatever works is good. Even if it causes complexity to be reduced, e.g. snakes loosing legs, or cave fish loosing eyes.
AI work, on the other hand, is focused on specific outcome spaces, trying things which seem reasonable and avoiding things which have no chance of working. This massively simplifies things, as you can massively lower the number of combinations needed to be checked.
The effort from going from Chimp to Human was marginally lower but still took a huge amount of effort. It was maybe 5 million years since the last common ancestor between Chimps and Humans and taking a generation to be like 20 years that’s at least 250,000 generations of a couple of thousand individuals in a complex environment with lots of processes going on. I haven’t done the math but that seems like a massive amount of computation. To go from human to Von Neumann still takes a huge search process. If we think of every individual human as consisting of evolution trying to get more intelligence there are almost 8 billion instances being ‘tried’ right now in a very complex environment. Granted that if humans were to run this process it may take a lot less time. If say breeding and selection of the most intelligent individuals in every generation was done it may take a lot less time to get human level intelligence if starting from a chimp.
The thing is, it’s not. Evolution is optimizing for the amount of descendants. Nothing more. If being more intelligent is the way forward—nice! If having blue hair results in even more children—even better! Intelligence just happens to be what evolution decided for humans. Daisies happened to come up with liking closely cropped grasslands, which is also currently a very good strategy (lawns). The point is that evolution chooses what to try totally at random, and whatever works is good. Even if it causes complexity to be reduced, e.g. snakes loosing legs, or cave fish loosing eyes.
AI work, on the other hand, is focused on specific outcome spaces, trying things which seem reasonable and avoiding things which have no chance of working. This massively simplifies things, as you can massively lower the number of combinations needed to be checked.