[ExI] Did Hugo de Garis leave the field?

[Ben Zaiboc]

I was disappointed to read this:

"Ask yourself how it’s possible for a creature of a given intelligence level to be able to design a creature of greater intelligence. Designing a creature of superior intelligence requires a level of intelligence that the designer simply does not have. Therefore, it is logically impossible to use the traditional blueprint-design approach to create a creature of superior intelligence"


So it's 'logically impossible', because designing a creature of superior intelligence requires a level of intelligence that the designer simply does not have??

Answering the question with a simple "No", with no actual reason given, other than "because it's impossible", is not acceptable.  He's saying "just because".

The best you can say is "I don't know".  There is absolutely no proof that a given intelligence can't design a superior one.  I expect most of the people reading this could think of at least one way of increasing their own intelligence, if we only had the tools.  I can think of 3 without even trying, and I'm far from very bright.

The other disturbing thing about the article is the assumption that if you don't understand every detail about how something works, you shouldn't use it.  Not to mention the implicit assumption that just because you use an evolutionary algorithm to design something, it's *inherently* non-understandable.


Ben Zaiboc