If You Can’t Program It, You Haven’t Understood It
Evolutionary algorithms don’t produce living beings
Brett: These are all uncertain hypotheses, but we also have to keep in mind that there’s so much about evolution by natural selection that we don’t know.
David Deutsch has this little quip, “If you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it.”
In the case of AGI, this means we can’t program it because we don’t understand this idea of general intelligence.
The same happens to be true of evolution by natural selection. There are things called evolutionary algorithms, but this is not programming evolution by natural selection. This is not being able to create artificial entities inside of a computer that, when subject to actual environmental pressures, are able to evolve towards this increasing complexity.