Comment by marcosdumay
5 days ago
Well, arguably that's exactly where we are, but machines can evolve faster.
And that's an entire new angle that the cultists are ignoring... because superintelligence may just not be very valuable.
And we don't need superintelligence for smart machines to be a problem anyway. We don't need even AGI. IMO, there's no reason to focus on that.
> Well, arguably that's exactly where we are
Yep; from the perspective of evolution (and more specifically, those animal species that only gain capability generationally by evolutionary adaptation of instinct), humans are the recursively self-(fitness-)improving accident.
Our species-aggregate capacity to compete for resources within the biosphere went superlinear in the middle of the previous century; and we've had to actively hit the brakes on how much of everything we take since then, handicapping . (With things like epidemic obesity and global climate change being the result of us not hitting those brakes quite hard enough.)
Insofar as a "singularity" can be defined on a per-agent basis, as the moment when something begins to change too rapidly for the given agent to ever hope to catch up with / react to new conditions — and so the agent goes from being a "player at the table" to a passive observer of what's now unfolding around them... then, from the rest of our biosphere's perspective, they've 100% already witnessed the "human singularity."
No living thing on Earth besides humans now has any comprehension of how the world has been or will be reshaped by human activity; nor can ever hope to do anything to push back against such reshaping. Every living thing on Earth other than humans, will only survive into the human future, if we humans either decide that it should survive, and act to preserve it; or if we humans just ignore the thing, and then just-so-happen to never accidentally do anything to wipe it from existence without even noticing.
> machines can evolve faster
[Squinty Thor] "Do they though?"
I think it's valuable to challenge this popular sentiment every once-in-a-while. Sure, it's a good poetic metaphor, but when you really start comparing their "lifecycle" and change-mechanisms to the swarming biological nanobots that cover the Earth, a bunch of critical aspects just aren't there or are being done to them rather than by them.
At least for now, these machines mostly "evolve" in the same sense that fashionable textile pants "evolve".