I don’t think evolutionary pressure is an intelligence; it’s in the name. It’s a pressure, like air pressure or water pressure, not an intelligence. There is no agency. The end results can be marvelous all the same. Evolution appears to make FDT-style trades, but is actually completely myopic. It’s survival of the survivors. If you’re dead, we don’t see you.
I don’t think we are materially disagreeing here, just working with very slight differences in definition of intelligence. I see a strong analogy to the debate between whether LLMs think or LLMs just predict the next token. I think that your claims that “There is no agency” and evolution is “completely myopic” are true for some reasonable definitions of agency and myopia, as long as you don’t make any arguments like “There is no agency / complete myopia, therefore evolution can’t X.” You aren’t making any such arguments, hence the lack of material disagreement.
On the subject of cats being deprived of roaming and hopped up on catnip, yeah I would not love that either, but the contrast to the outcomes for cows or chickens is big. Getting alignment close enough that the result is preferable to going extinct is a high bar. To reiterate, we could also just stop, but that would be ludicrous.
I don’t think we are materially disagreeing here, just working with very slight differences in definition of intelligence. I see a strong analogy to the debate between whether LLMs think or LLMs just predict the next token. I think that your claims that “There is no agency” and evolution is “completely myopic” are true for some reasonable definitions of agency and myopia, as long as you don’t make any arguments like “There is no agency / complete myopia, therefore evolution can’t X.” You aren’t making any such arguments, hence the lack of material disagreement.
On the subject of cats being deprived of roaming and hopped up on catnip, yeah I would not love that either, but the contrast to the outcomes for cows or chickens is big. Getting alignment close enough that the result is preferable to going extinct is a high bar. To reiterate, we could also just stop, but that would be ludicrous.