
Darwin, Machines, and the Future: A conversation with George Dyson - domrdy
https://www.nfx.com/post/why-your-work-matters/
======
amb23
The lineage of technological progress does not follow the same path as
commercial development of a pre-existing technology applied to a pre-existing
market. We need to be careful not to equate the two. As much as a D2C brand or
SaaS startup may brilliantly bring a new market innovation to the fore, they
rarely bring new technological innovations--and the potential to expand the
pie rather than extract market value--with them. Technological progress is a
halting, stop-and-start process, and the market isn't always welcoming to it
even in cases when the economics of the innovation make sense. So, yes--if
you're working on truly progressive technology, take this sense of purpose the
author speaks of to heart. But tech as an industry shouldn't appropriate this
purpose when it cannot follow through on it.

~~~
zippy5
I respectfully disagree. New technologies don't intrinsically expand the pie,
lowering the price/performance ratio does. D2C and SAAS lower the cost of
distribution which historically been a significant markup on goods. The
consumer pays less and thus have more money to spend on other goods and
services. Therefore the pie expands.

Examples of technologies failing to change price/performance:

1) Self driving cars: can you replace people working for less than minimum
wage with the expensive hardware and liability related costs? Eventually yes
but even airplanes are struggling and that is a far easier problem.

The counter example might be closer to Tesla's auto pilot.

2) DC electrical grid (as implemented by Edison): expensive to transmit over
distance relative to AC.

3) Fuel cell cars: the platinum catalysts drove up the price. (There were
other factors as well).

Examples of technologies succeeding to change price/performance:

1) Light bulb: factories could be productive even at night. Since most of the
costs were fixed, getting more productivity was invaluable.

2) CPU's: Moore's law

3) Solar: Manufacturing costs were the real obstacle, and improved
manufacturing and economies of scale led to an economically viable product.

I don't claim to be perfectly right about all these cases but I think they
illustrate the gist of what I'm saying.

------
bumby
> As Dyson says, we’re in the middle of a Black Swan

It’s interesting to note that Nassim Taleb who coined the term “black swan”
disagrees that the current pandemic qualifies. As he points out, not only was
this predictable, it was also inevitable. We have literally made movies
portraying it

~~~
op03
Also DARPA - [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/how-a-
secre...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/how-a-secretive-
pentagon-agency-seeded-the-ground-for-a-rapid-coronavirus-
cure/2020/07/30/ad1853c4-c778-11ea-a9d3-74640f25b953_story.html)

There were comments in HN predictions threads for 2020/for the next decade etc
talking about pandemics. The hive mind belches out some interesting stuff once
in while.

------
xamuel
From the article: "In terms of a distributed artificial intelligence, Dyson is
a believer. Because with a distributed system, you have an opportunity for
evolution, for it to find itself and to learn on its own."

I published a paper in this year's AGI conference that would certainly support
this line of reasoning. In my paper, "AGI and the Knight-Darwin Law", I argue
that if an AGI single-handedly creates a child AGI with no outside assistance,
than the child is necessarily less intelligent than the parent. Thus if
machines are going to create more intelligent machines, it's necessary for the
creating machines to _collaborate_ in order to do so. This closely parallels a
law proposed by Darwin, called the Knight-Darwin Law, a cornerstone of his
Origin of Species. The KDL states that it's impossible for one organism to
asexually produce another, which asexually produces another, and so on
forever; sexual reproduction is necessary or the line must terminate. (Darwin
was of course well aware of seemingly-asexual species. His motivation for
postulating the KDL was the observation that seemingly-asexual species _do_
rarely sexually reproduce, e.g. if a rainstorm damages the part of a flower
that would otherwise isolate its stamen, etc.)

Here is the paper:
[https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEAAT-10.pdf](https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEAAT-10.pdf)

~~~
at_a_remove
What about the trivial case of the AGI simply self-replicating? Then you have
a child, it is identical, and is therefore of identical intelligence (however
you measure that), and therefore it is _not_ necessarily less intelligent.

What if the AGI is intelligent enough to randomly mutate offspring here and
there? Then one might be more intelligent, and again it is not necessarily
less intelligent.

What if the AGI is intelligent enough to look at its own code, identify some
kind of bias in its programming (not unlike human introspection), and produce
a child without that bias? That child would then be better able to model
reality -- a core element of intelligence -- and again you've got a smarter
child.

I have a difficult time buying the "necessarily" part.

~~~
Animats
_I have a difficult time buying the "necessarily" part._

Yes. That's borrowed from an old theological argument.

Especially since much of the progress in machine learning is just putting more
hardware and data on the same algorithms.

~~~
xamuel
Could you clarify what you mean when you say "That's borrowed from an old
theological argument"?

~~~
Animats
Sigh. Here, from a creationist site.[1] There's an argument that the second
law of thermodynamics prevents evolution, because evolution decreases entropy.

Having a star around to power things helps beat that problem.

[1] [https://christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-
thermodynamics.html](https://christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-
thermodynamics.html)

~~~
xamuel
The only similarity between that and my argument is that both involve a
measure decreasing. Are you saying that one fallacious argument involving a
decreasing measure invalidates all arguments ever that involve (completely
unrelated) decreasing measures?

As is so often the case in academia, the basic idea is hidden by all the
academic jargon. The basic idea is quite simple. Suppose you roll up your
sleeves, get to work, and announce to the world: "Turing machine #57835 is an
AGI with truthful knowledge". Then, without even needing to run Turing machine
#57835 (which might be prohibitively expensive), just as a purely logical
consequence of your announcement, you can conclude that the following ordinal
number A is a computable ordinal: "The supremum of all ordinals B such that B
has some code k such that Turing machine #57835 knows that k is a code of a
computable ordinal". By construction, this ordinal A, for which you concretely
know a code, is larger than any ordinal for which Turing machine #57835 knows
a code. So in at least one extremely specific technical sense (the sense of
knowing codes for large ordinals), you are more intelligent than Turing
machine #57835.

Which part of this argument is unclear?

------
jecel
I have no idea what George Dyson means when he says Turing had a 1D memory and
Von Neumann changed it to a 2D memory. I consider both to be equally 1D with
Turing having sequential access and Von Neumann random access. What I call 2D
memory is a segmented addressing scheme.

The implementation in the form of Williams Tubes (used in Von Neumann's
Princeton machine) is indeed 2D, as is a modern DRAM or SRAM. But it is
wrapped up in a 1D interface to the rest of the computer (a little less
obviously so with RAS and CAS in DRAMs).

------
hitech_dude
Has any body been anlemto secure funding from the NFX FAST seed program ?

It was supposed to be an online only application with a clear timetable.

------
polynomial
Am I the only one who thinks it's weird Dyson rips off the title from Samuel
Butler's seminal masterpiece? It strikes me as extremely disingenuous;
certainly unbecoming his intellectual aspirations.

------
Johnjonjoan
This is how I imagine 'mad scientists' justify their work.

~~~
throwanem
I feel like calling VCs "mad scientists" is unduly ennobling.

~~~
polynomial
"mad engineers"? /s

~~~
mrec
Sad truth:
[http://cowbirdsinlove.com/comics/46/engineer.png](http://cowbirdsinlove.com/comics/46/engineer.png)

~~~
throwanem
Having seen how scientists build things vs. how engineers build things, I
don't see how that can be true. If it were, I'd expect the take-over-the-world
failure rate to be somewhat less than the current 100%.

