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If you can't simulate and understand biology then you can't overcome the limits of AGI. Well that's the opinion of this paper: researchgate.net/publication/33… #ai
I'm going to argue however that simulating biology is a harder problem than AGI. So I expect AGI to happen before we solve human biology. Kurzweil's immortality will have to wait for AGI to happen.
But why is it that we can bypass the complexity of biology and invent more streamlined general intelligence? That's because biology creates Rube Goldberg like mechanisms. Biology is gratuitously complex.
In fact we already see a reflection of this gratuitous complexity in the cognitive biases that we inherited. Our thinking is driven by emotional nudges and the better thinkers are the ones who don't control their mind but rather control their emotions.
An artificial intelligence would be more streamlined. We don't have to inherit evolutionary baggage and use more systematic cognitive procedures. Building an AGI circumvents plenty of unnecessary baggage that comes with biology.
Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is that humans exert an extraordinary amount of effort to think systematically. It's an innate skill. We can think faster, but that requires unnatural training of our own neural networks. Ask any child prodigy if they enjoyed their childhood.
This is the big gamble that AGI research plays. Can we develop good approximations of human general intelligence without needing to understanding neuroscience in excruciating detail? We will achieve AGI before we understand how the brain works.
Our models of complex adaptive systems will be based on models that AGIs generate. There's going to be a massive shift in science. We will be acting more like gardeners in growing cognitive machines rather than engineers.
To get there, we need to re-educate ourselves. We need to introduce the kind of systematic thinking of the hard sciences into the complex world of the soft and messy sciences. However, we have to abandon the illusion of control. Instead adopt a more holistic way of thinking.
Reductionism in complex systems tend to fail, particularly in biology. That's because cells are not anything like billiard balls. Each and every cell has the potential to regenerate the entire organism. Biology is so technologically advanced that we might as well call it magic.
It is as if we've stumbled upon an advanced alien space ship and are trying to figure out how it works. That advanced technology just happens to exist in our biology. It's literally right underneath our noses!
@threadreaderapp unroll please
