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.
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.
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 jeez, please don't say "cheap brain-scale computers" next to "AGI" like that. There are capitalists everywhere.`