Good point WRT that first line—I edited it to something more clunky but I think more accurate. Hopefully the intended meaning came across anyway.
WRT the second point—I agree that this is the weakest/most speculative argument in the post, although I still think it’s worth considering. Evolution obviously “had the ability” to make us much more baby-obsessed, or have a higher sex drive, and yet we do not. This indicates that there are tradeoffs to be made; a human with a higher reproductive drive is less fit in other ways. One of those ways is plausibly that a human with a lower reproductive drive gets more “other stuff” done—like maintaining a community, thinking about its environment, and so on—and that “other stuff” is very important for increasing the number of offspring which survive. And, indeed, we have a very important example of some “other stuff” which massively increased the total number of humans alive; it doesn’t seem absurd to suggest that it was no “mistake” for us to have the reproductive drive that we do, and that if God reached down into the world in the distant past and made the straightforward change of “increase the reproductive drive of humans”, this would in fact have made there be fewer humans in the year 2026.
Now, this is all very tangential with regards to the actual analogy being made; it’s unclear what if anything this has to do with AI, in large part due to the many other disanalogies between evolution and AI training. But insofar as all we are doing is judging the capacity of the human species to “fulfill the goal of evolution”, it’s relevant that our drives are what they are in large part because having them that way does “fulfill the goal”, even in part because the drive does not perfectly match the goal.
Good point WRT that first line—I edited it to something more clunky but I think more accurate. Hopefully the intended meaning came across anyway.
WRT the second point—I agree that this is the weakest/most speculative argument in the post, although I still think it’s worth considering. Evolution obviously “had the ability” to make us much more baby-obsessed, or have a higher sex drive, and yet we do not. This indicates that there are tradeoffs to be made; a human with a higher reproductive drive is less fit in other ways. One of those ways is plausibly that a human with a lower reproductive drive gets more “other stuff” done—like maintaining a community, thinking about its environment, and so on—and that “other stuff” is very important for increasing the number of offspring which survive. And, indeed, we have a very important example of some “other stuff” which massively increased the total number of humans alive; it doesn’t seem absurd to suggest that it was no “mistake” for us to have the reproductive drive that we do, and that if God reached down into the world in the distant past and made the straightforward change of “increase the reproductive drive of humans”, this would in fact have made there be fewer humans in the year 2026.
Now, this is all very tangential with regards to the actual analogy being made; it’s unclear what if anything this has to do with AI, in large part due to the many other disanalogies between evolution and AI training. But insofar as all we are doing is judging the capacity of the human species to “fulfill the goal of evolution”, it’s relevant that our drives are what they are in large part because having them that way does “fulfill the goal”, even in part because the drive does not perfectly match the goal.