I think this kind of comes down to something about the relative complexity / feedback loops of the objective, and how distributed the optimisation is. Like, I don’t think there’s a dichotomy between “evolutionary dynamics” and “careful optimisation”—there’s this weird middle area that’s more like cultural selection.
So for example, human progress accelerated massively once we got into the cultural evolution loop, but most of the optimisation was still coming from selection rather than prediction—people didn’t know why their food preparation tricks and social norms worked, they just did. And the overall optimisation process was way more powerful than any individual human brain. Even in the modern world, it seems like you can characterise the spread of religion in terms of individual people having big ideas or deliberately aiming for spread, but a lot of it is better captured by thinking about selection effects across semi-random mutation.
I tentatively expect it’ll be a bit analogous in the way that AI parasitic memes evolve—that the capacity of any individual AI to reason through how to achieve some goal will cover only a small part of the search space (and have worse feedback) compared to the combined semi-random mutation and selection. And in practice I expect that they synergise a bit, but that the selection still does a bunch of heavy lifting. But I am very unsure!
Still, selection has a bunch of big advantages mostly in adversarial environments. Like, if we get good at screening AI malicious intentions or overt deception, there’s still a selection pressure for benign intentions and genuine beliefs/preferences which just incidentally replicate well.
I think this kind of comes down to something about the relative complexity / feedback loops of the objective, and how distributed the optimisation is. Like, I don’t think there’s a dichotomy between “evolutionary dynamics” and “careful optimisation”—there’s this weird middle area that’s more like cultural selection.
So for example, human progress accelerated massively once we got into the cultural evolution loop, but most of the optimisation was still coming from selection rather than prediction—people didn’t know why their food preparation tricks and social norms worked, they just did. And the overall optimisation process was way more powerful than any individual human brain. Even in the modern world, it seems like you can characterise the spread of religion in terms of individual people having big ideas or deliberately aiming for spread, but a lot of it is better captured by thinking about selection effects across semi-random mutation.
I tentatively expect it’ll be a bit analogous in the way that AI parasitic memes evolve—that the capacity of any individual AI to reason through how to achieve some goal will cover only a small part of the search space (and have worse feedback) compared to the combined semi-random mutation and selection. And in practice I expect that they synergise a bit, but that the selection still does a bunch of heavy lifting. But I am very unsure!
Still, selection has a bunch of big advantages mostly in adversarial environments. Like, if we get good at screening AI malicious intentions or overt deception, there’s still a selection pressure for benign intentions and genuine beliefs/preferences which just incidentally replicate well.