What’s the point of evolution for something which isn’t alive and has no will to live and no environment that it really needs to be part of for survival?
I think about this when we talk about bots that continually improve? Continually improve to where ? To what end ?
I’m asking out of curiosity not out of malice btw, it’s just an interesting thing to think about.
I’m hoping that we eventually realise that life is pretty awesome albeit slower and learn that even a bird is really an amazing thing.
There is no point to evolution in the technical sense of the word. Evolution is just a dynamic. Dynamics don't seek purpose.
The thing that makes evolution a special dynamic is that everything that exists and you get to perceive is either the result of evolution, or compatible with it.
Will to life is effectively an artifact of evolution. Things with ways to express some form of persistence and reproduction have an implicit will to live.
Leaving aside whatever goals AIs may be programmed for, if at some point a dynamic for persistence and reproduction appears it will dominate any competing systems that don't have it on that basis alone. Systems that incorporate and propagate useful features for their survival will have capabilities to adapt and persist that are very limited in known lifeforms.
This is assuming that evolving at 1 million times faster than other life is actually possible or advantageous. There may actually be a reason why faster != better.
Of course there is a point to evolution, which is to utilise the environment to preserve your genes and pass them onto the next generation.
Evolve to slow though and you die, evolve too fast, you’re no longer compatible with your environment and also die.
Bacteria can reproduce in about 30 minutes, I think. That's in the order of 1,000,000 times faster than a human.
As I'm not a biologist, I would only be guessing if that corresponds to evolving 1 million times faster, or if the relative complexity of the organisms makes it either more or less than that.
Evolution by natural selection has no objectives, goals, direction or, for that matter, point. It has no purpose, it just happens. Every living organism on earth is the result of an unimaginably large series of random mutations across an equally unimaginable span of time, all completely absent of guidance.
AI, however, is different. We set the objectives. We decide where we want it to go. And, based on this, we setup artificial selection to make it happen.
A suitable cost function to optimize. It could be moving faster, reducing energy consumption. Or maximizing the harvest of the use case type called "money" from the environment called "humans". Whatever that means.
What’s the point of evolution for something which isn’t alive and has no will to live and no environment that it really needs to be part of for survival?
I think about this when we talk about bots that continually improve? Continually improve to where ? To what end ?
I’m asking out of curiosity not out of malice btw, it’s just an interesting thing to think about.
I’m hoping that we eventually realise that life is pretty awesome albeit slower and learn that even a bird is really an amazing thing.