alt Hacker NewsThe analogy is helpful, but yes we should be able to “intelligently design” something better than sleep analogues since we’re not constrained by evolution like in humans.
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lxgr • today at 4:34 PM
We are however constrained by the complexity of any purported solution. That's the bitter lesson, in a nutshell.
At the very least, we know that sleep and dreaming do exist in biological brains. (Doesn't mean any of it is applicable to artificial neural nets, doesn't mean it'll work for our specific architectures etc. etc., but at least the idea requires fewer assumptions than a completely untested novel theory.)
Evolution constrains the evolution of human beings, but it's also excellent at discovering elegant designs that work very reliably at a low cost.
Maybe someday we'll understand the way our minds work well enough to design from first principles but until then we've only got one template for how a thinking machine should look.