this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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What if we're not smart enough to build something like that?
Possible, but seems unlikely.
Evolution managed it, and evolution isn’t as smart as us, it’s just got many many chances to guess right.
If we can’t figure it out we can find a way to get lucky like evolution did, it’ll be expensive and maybe needs us to get a more efficient computing platform (cheap brain-scale computers so we can make millions of attempts quickly).
So yeah. My money is that we’ll figure it out sooner or later.
Whether we’ll be smart enough to make it do what we want and not turn us all into paperclips or something is another question.
Oh jeez, please don't say "cheap brain-scale computers" next to "AGI" like that. There are capitalists everywhere.`
I don't think you are estimating correctly the amount of energy spent by "evolution" to reach this.
There are plenty of bodies in the universe with nothing like human brain.
You should count the energy not of just Earth's existence, formation, Solar system's formation and so on, but much of the visible space around. "Much" is kinda unclear, but converting that to energy so big, so we shouldn't even bother.
It's best to assume we'll never have anything even resembling wetware in efficiency. One can say that genomes of life existing on Earth are similar to fossil fuels, only for highly optimized designs we won't like ever reach by ourselves. Except "design" might be a wrong word.
Honestly I think at some point we are going to have biocomputers. I mean, we already do, just the way evolution optimized that (giving everyone more or less equal share of computing power) isn't pleasant for some.
Same logic would suggest we’d never compete with an eyeball, but we went from 10 minute photos to outperforming most of the eyes abilities in cheap consumer hardware in little more than a century.
And the eye is almost as crucial to survival as the brain.
That said, I do agree it seems likely we’ll borrow from biology on the computer problem. Brains have very impressive parallelism despite how terrible the design of neurons is. If we can grow a brain in the lab that would be very useful indeed. More useful if we could skip the chemical messaging somehow and get signals around at a speed that wasn’t embarrassingly slow, then we’d be way ahead of biology in the hardware performance game and would have a real chance of coming up with something like agi, even without the level of problem solving that billions of years of evolution can provide.
Yeah and it only took evolution (checks notes) 4 billion years to go from nothing to a brain valuable to humans.
I'm not so sure there will be a fast return in any economic timescale on the money investors are currently shovelling into AI.
We have maybe 500 years (tops) to see if we're smart enough to avoid causing our own extinction by climate change and biodiversity collapse - so I don't think it's anywhere near as clear cut.
Oh sure, the current ai craze is just a hype train based on one seemingly effective trick.
We have outperformed biology in a number of areas, and cannot compete in a number of others (yet), so I see it as a bit of a wash atm whether we’re better engineers than nature or worse atm.
The brain looks to be a tricky thing to compete with, but it has some really big limitations we don’t need to deal with (chemical neuron messaging really sucks by most measures).
So yeah, not saying we’ll do agi in the next few decades (and not with just LLMs, for sure), but I’d be surprised if we don’t figure something out once get computers a couple orders of magnitude faster so more than a handful of companies can afford to experiment.