True and important, but if anything I think the importance in this particular community is often overstated rather than unappreciated. I suspect the analogy itself is downstream of a flaw in human languages, which are very agent-centric in their grammatical assumptions. They didn’t evolve to describe impersonal forces like evolution, and trying to do so without such analogies is often very cumbersome in ways that obfuscate the reality more than they enlighten.
Evolution Does Not Produce Individual Brains
A lot of good points in this section as well. To the “Who cares?” question, the answer is, “We do, until and unless we know how to use other methods that do sufficiently reliably encode the goals we (should) care about into the AIs we create.”
True and important, but if anything I think the importance in this particular community is often overstated rather than unappreciated. I suspect the analogy itself is downstream of a flaw in human languages, which are very agent-centric in their grammatical assumptions. They didn’t evolve to describe impersonal forces like evolution, and trying to do so without such analogies is often very cumbersome in ways that obfuscate the reality more than they enlighten.
A lot of good points in this section as well. To the “Who cares?” question, the answer is, “We do, until and unless we know how to use other methods that do sufficiently reliably encode the goals we (should) care about into the AIs we create.”