[ExI] Tim May and DNA

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2019 at 10:36 AM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

>  If you look back as recently as 15 years ago at what was commonly written
> > about all the stuff we could learn if we could read our DNA, it is
> > laughable: we thought that whole system was far simpler than it turned
> out
> > to be.  We are still finding new complications.



That's true, and yet we know for a fact that the entire recipe for building
a human being is less than 750 meg long even though its written in
convoluted spaghetti code with massive amounts of redundancy.  I want to
consider a very small amount of that 750 meg, the part involving the brain
hardware and even more important the part that encodes the general learning
algorithm that enabled Einstein to go from learning which way is up on the
day he was born to learning how General Relativity works 36 years later.

There is a correlation between the brain size of animals and their
intelligence but the correlation is not very strong and there are lots of
glaring exceptions. Crows ravens and parrots are about as smart as
chimpanzees and yet their brains are hundreds of times smaller. I suspect
birds have less spaghetti code and their programming is more streamlined
because if there is environmental pressure to become smarter a flying
creature can't just develop a larger heaver brain like the ancestor of a
chimp could, so it must develop smaller faster better software.

Some humans have small brains and yet can be quite intelligent, for example
the very successful french poet and novelist Anatole France won the 1921
Nobel Prize in Literature ("in recognition of his brilliant literary
achievements")  and he had a brain of only about 2/3 average weight. At the
other end of the spectrum another another very successful writer, the
Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, had a brain a third larger than average,
twice the size of  Anatole France's. So if you don't need a big brain to be
smart why did Evolution bother with producing one? Perhaps because of
longevity, with lots of spare capacity you can still function even if
something goes wrong with part of your brain. People with very small brains
can be just as smart as everybody else when young but are much more likely
to develop senile dementia when they're in their 40s.

All this makes me think the era of true AI may be much closer than many
people think, I wouldn't be surprised if the master learning algorithm in
its most efficient form is less than a meg in size; with such a program and
time to learn from the external world maybe a human level AI could exist on
a iPhone.

 John K Clark
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