I think it’s either that or we won’t be able to build any human-level AGI without WBE.
Why?
Agreed. However hominid evolution was clearly not pure luck since it involved significant improvement over a relatively short time span.
It wasn’t pure luck, there was selective pressure. But this signal towards improvement is often weak and noisy, and it doesn’t necessarily correlate well with intelligence: a chimp is smarter than a lion, but not generally more evolutionary fit. Even homo sapiens had a population bottleneck 70,000 which almost led to extinction.
It is my intuition that if something as complex and powerful as human-level intelligence can be engineered in the foreseeable future, than it would have to use some kind of bootstrapping. I admit it is possible than I’m wrong and that in fact progress in AGI would be through a very long sequence of small improvements and that the AGI will be given no introspective / self-modification powers. In this scenario, a “proto-singularity” is a real possibility. However, what I think will happen is that we won’t make significant progress before we develop a powerful mathematical formalism. Once such a formalism exists, it will be much more efficient to use it in order to build a pseudo-narrow self-modifying AI than keep improving AI “brick by brick”.
Why?
It wasn’t pure luck, there was selective pressure. But this signal towards improvement is often weak and noisy, and it doesn’t necessarily correlate well with intelligence: a chimp is smarter than a lion, but not generally more evolutionary fit. Even homo sapiens had a population bottleneck 70,000 which almost led to extinction.
It is my intuition that if something as complex and powerful as human-level intelligence can be engineered in the foreseeable future, than it would have to use some kind of bootstrapping. I admit it is possible than I’m wrong and that in fact progress in AGI would be through a very long sequence of small improvements and that the AGI will be given no introspective / self-modification powers. In this scenario, a “proto-singularity” is a real possibility. However, what I think will happen is that we won’t make significant progress before we develop a powerful mathematical formalism. Once such a formalism exists, it will be much more efficient to use it in order to build a pseudo-narrow self-modifying AI than keep improving AI “brick by brick”.