alt Hacker News> I am starting to get the idea that AI feels like ants or weeds or mold.
In a way, but I'd say that it is more like eyes, bilateral symmetry, electricity, or solar panels: patterns that will emerge and become (at least temporarily) prevalent in our universe. It is a matter of probability in many repeated interactions.
The "artificial" in AI is a misnomer in this regard, imho. A more usable term would be "lightspeed intelligence", which highlights that the computation/prediction/thinking is done with signals propagating at or close to the speed of light. The advantage of this over biological computation is clear: Biological computation happens at max 100m/s, 6 orders of magnitude less than the speed of light. Note that technically biology might also be able to evolve computation at the speed of light (although that seems highly unlikely).
Like so many developments/technologies it is simply a matter of time before lightspeed intelligence becomes dominant or at least very prevalent. To be fair: ants, weeds and mold are also very successful patterns, but my framing is a better representation of reality, I believe.
Replies
> Lightspeed intelligence ... biology might also be able to evolve computation at the speed of light
I feel like this is dramatically missing the point. It is trivial to come up with a communication system where signals travel at the speed of light. In fact, anything visual meets this criteria: sign language, semaphores, clicking your flashlight on and off. Radio waves travel at the speed of light. All of humanity became a giant "lightspeed-intelligent" brain when radio was first invented.
It really does matter what you're doing with those signals, how much information each contains, how many you're sending, how much power it takes to send and receive them, how they're encoded, etc. Focusing on the fact that they travel at the speed of light is silly.
> The advantage of this over biological computation is clear: Biological computation happens at max 100m/s, 6 orders of magnitude less than the speed of light
You are trying to compare computation power by measuring distances. You are basically saying "one biological computation" is a million times slower than "one silicon computation" because of how fast signals travel, completely ignoring what is actually happening in those extremely different computations. It's still not clear that brains can be compared to computers at all, but if you try to simplify it down to FLOPS (a much better measure of computation speed than "how fast do some signals go"), our best estimates are that one brain has the computational equivalent of somewhere between 1,000 and 100,000 modern GPUs.
Do you have a source on the speed limit of biological computation. Potential gradients should behave just like electricity. Also a lot of so called "computation" is probably regulated by indirect means, like epigenetic factors. It's definitely more than a bunch of neurons messaging each other. Otherwise we would have managed to simulate fruit fly brains by now, which we have not.