Comment by devoply
8 years ago
> I am seriously interested in understanding why a lot of people have no issue accepting the idea of humans evolving fromm immaterial matter into biological beings and all the way up to our current reality but have a hard time believing that can be done via computers.
It took nature what like 4 billion years to come up with the human brain in a single species... We including Kurweil think that this can be replicated in say 100, I mean not even that according to the singularity, 40 years. I seriously doubt it. Can the human brain eventually be surpassed, yes, but it's very likely that we will go extinct before then.
It also took billions of years to evolve heavier than air flight, but it took technology much less time than that.
How long did it take evolution to build a structure taller than 100 m?
Technology just moves on different timescales, with different methods and different objectives. Evolution is slow and dumb, and not goal oriented.
In some domains, technology might never catch up to biology. In others we've beaten it soundly.
Planes don't fly like birds. We have ornithopter which are crude imitations of bird flight. Very crude. Similarly our AI are a very crude imitations of the real thing and I believe will continue to be for some significant time. At least a few hundred years for a somewhat plausible imitation of an intelligent machine. I believe extinction of the race within the next 10,000 years is incredibly likely. I also don't think the intelligent machines that we build will last very long because they will be difficult and expensive to build and because of the incredibly small size of their tech, say 1 nanometer or less, will be prone to various kinds of failure and also require rare materials that are in limited supply and can't be recycled so they are difficult to obtain for both us and for the AI to maintain its own supply chain without us. So our bots will go extinct soon after us.
Consciousness transfer is probably 10s of thousands if not millions of years away.
One reason is that technology has the ability to do trial and error through billions of generations in a very short time.
Yes, but each "trial" exists in a simulation that is many orders of magnitude less complex than the one evolution used over billions of years. The result is that the knowledge learned from each trial is many orders of magnitude less useful.