On 22/11/2014 23:43, Matt Mahoney via AGI wrote:
On Sat, Nov 22, 2014 at 7:19 PM, Tim Tyler via AGI <[email protected]> wrote:
Maybe. Another hypothesis is a relatively recent common ancestry
from a creature with a fairly large-genome. The distribution of genome
sizes might help to resolve this one - if there's really a wall at the lower
end, that might show up in the distribution of genome sizes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_size
There is a wide range among related species, but definitely a lower
bound that increases for higher organisms.
The presented data is graphed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome_size#mediaviewer/File:Genome_Sizes.png
That looks as though the mammals have a very narrow distribution of genome
sizes -
compared to the other categories of organism in the list. It doesn't give
details
of the distribution of genome sizes within the order of mammals. However,
from the data it does give, 'recent common ancestor' looks like a pretty
reasonable explanation for the lower limit on the genome sizes of mammals.
I think this
means that we can forget about human level machine intelligence, work on swarms
of relatively stupid minions and use the magic of collective intelligence and
crowd-
power to get them to perform useful work for us.
Like gray goo or genetically engineered pathogens? It's easy to create
computing power. It's much harder to get machines to know what we
know. That's essential if we want to communicate with them
efficiently, like we do with people. We have a lot of knowledge in our
brains, but it is only accessible through slow communication channels.
Knowledge gets into brains in three main ways: from genes,
from social learning (memes) and from individual learning.
A lot of socially-learned information is already available on the
internet - either free, or for a fee. Humans learn most of what
they need to survive in 20-30 years. Of course, machines will have
a learning curve too. Material which is on the internet will be able
to be slurped up pretty fast, though. It is things like astronomical
observations and particle accelerators that will slow machines down.
You can't easily rush those kinds of observational learning.
--
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|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ [email protected] Remove lock to reply.
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