"The odds are really good that life generally exists in the same way that we do because that assumes that we're the norm, and not some special case!"
There's nothing normal about us. :)
Also, I would point out that intelligence is not what's under consideration in Blindsight -- sentience is. There are a lot of smart animals in the world who don't exhibit any real sense of sentience. None of them are as smart as us, but it's not clear that sentience is a requirement for human-level intelligence. Co-joined with Blindsight's other concept "Survival of the Least Inadequate", it may be that our sentience-handicapped intelligence is just good enough to outpace everyone here, in other environments, perhaps not.
There are plenty of examples here on Earth of animals who have evolved in different ways to solve the exact same problem. Some of these animals have a much less efficient solution, but because the less-efficient solution works sufficiently well for the animals' local environment, they never get pushed to a more efficient one. In fact, because of the random influences of evolution, you might never be able to get to a superior solution -- your initial random mutation lead you down a path to a locally-superior solution, but not a global one and you can't back-track or cross the gulf between you and the other solution states.
Anyway, we've got way too little comparison data.
Also? Those Singularity guys? Way too rah-rah on intelligence. More intelligence != Always better. Look at it this way: We know that most other apes are fairly intelligent, but our treatment of those species is pretty awful on balance. If we come up with a super-intelligence that's just as much smarter than us as we are over apes, there's no reason to expect that it will behave better towards us than we do towards apes. Granted, computational intelligences have a completely different set of resource requirements than we do. It's quite possible that we wouldn't really be competing in the classic evolutionary sense.
Frankly, while I hope for super-intelligences that are interested in helping us become better intelligences ourselves, I'll settle for benign neglect.
no subject
"The odds are really good that life generally exists in the same way that we do because that assumes that we're the norm, and not some special case!"
There's nothing normal about us. :)
Also, I would point out that intelligence is not what's under consideration in Blindsight -- sentience is. There are a lot of smart animals in the world who don't exhibit any real sense of sentience. None of them are as smart as us, but it's not clear that sentience is a requirement for human-level intelligence. Co-joined with Blindsight's other concept "Survival of the Least Inadequate", it may be that our sentience-handicapped intelligence is just good enough to outpace everyone here, in other environments, perhaps not.
There are plenty of examples here on Earth of animals who have evolved in different ways to solve the exact same problem. Some of these animals have a much less efficient solution, but because the less-efficient solution works sufficiently well for the animals' local environment, they never get pushed to a more efficient one. In fact, because of the random influences of evolution, you might never be able to get to a superior solution -- your initial random mutation lead you down a path to a locally-superior solution, but not a global one and you can't back-track or cross the gulf between you and the other solution states.
Anyway, we've got way too little comparison data.
Also? Those Singularity guys? Way too rah-rah on intelligence. More intelligence != Always better. Look at it this way: We know that most other apes are fairly intelligent, but our treatment of those species is pretty awful on balance. If we come up with a super-intelligence that's just as much smarter than us as we are over apes, there's no reason to expect that it will behave better towards us than we do towards apes. Granted, computational intelligences have a completely different set of resource requirements than we do. It's quite possible that we wouldn't really be competing in the classic evolutionary sense.
Frankly, while I hope for super-intelligences that are interested in helping us become better intelligences ourselves, I'll settle for benign neglect.
later
Tom