Comment by rafiki6
8 years ago
It matters tremendously. Think about the economics of bird flight vs. plane flight. Why is it that flight has been around for almost 100 years now and yet we still aren't flying everywhere? The reality is we can always come up with subpar ways of doing things, but there's a reason birds have evolved as they are today that we just can't replicate ourselves. We mastered long haul rapid flights, but bird flight generalizes much better. They might be slower in long haul, but they are much better and short haul and medium haul and have evolved to work in groups to make long haul possible. So yes, analogously we can create intelligence in a different way, which we are, but it likely won't generalize as well.
If we could reduce the density of a person by about an order of magnitude we can start replicating bird flight on a per-person basis. Our approaches to flight are constrained in all forms by the desire to put really heavy things into the air.
Look no further than drones that can operate for quite a long while, move in any dimension fairly well, and manage some pretty ridiculous speeds for not being designed to do so all because their purpose is not to carry large complicated amounts of weight.