Not to say we shouldn't keep trying, but we all seem to think that the best computer will evolve from solving lots and lots of partial differential equations into being like the brain, but animal brains have evolved to solve really different questions than why we have been making computers.
The thing that always strikes me as interesting about the evolution of intelligence is that it's a mostly unnecessary latecomer to the evolutionary party: plenty of things thrive in nature without anything even remotely resembling human intelligence, even plenty of large animals that function quite well in complex environments rely mostly on hard coded "unintelligent" systems in their brains.
The fact is, most of the problems that need to be solved to survive and reproduce can be solved very effectively without much general intelligence. Sure, once evolution discovers intelligence it turns out to be a very efficient way to implement a lot of functionality that would otherwise need to be hard coded, but it's not strictly necessary, and nature did just fine without it for a long time.
The good news: that also means that it's unlikely that significant evolutionary pressures went into designing the complex systems responsible for intelligent thought, so they were probably accidentally "designed" via random drift. If you think about that, given the complexity of the algorithms involved, it means that the algorithm space at that level complexity is probably fairly dense with algorithms that function intelligently (where by "fairly dense" I mean that it's a lot denser than we might assume otherwise, and the solution that evolution came up with is probably not the only possible one).
That means if we ever figure out how to do a guided search through algorithms of the right complexity in the right way, we may yet stand a chance of "accidentally" discovering intelligence rather than deliberately designing it.
> that also means that it's unlikely that significant evolutionary pressures went into designing the complex systems responsible for intelligent thought, so they were probably accidentally "designed" via random drift
I find this unlikely. Perhaps the initial "push" towards intelligence was based in random drift, but humans' evolutionary path has actually paid quite a dear price to have the high intelligence that we have:
* Larger brains led to larger heads
* Larger heads led to the need to give birth earlier, and with more risk
* Earlier birth lead to helpless babies
* Helpless babies require much more care, and mothers become dependent on fathers
* Large brains are only very useful if trained for long periods of time leading to long, expensive and dangerous childhoods
I don't think this whole process can be explained by random drift.
I think the question of what caused pressure towards higher intelligence in our evolutionary process can be answered by competition.
Analogously, consider tree heights. A tree doesn't need to be very high at all to collect sunlight. But a tree competing with other trees can grow to tremendous heights due to competition.
When competing for resources with other similarly intelligent beings, more intelligence could definitely yield an evolutionary edge.
The main differentiating factor that turns humans to thinkers is language. There are very few other species who have some form of communications and none have the capacity to express complex abstract syntactic structures like we do. It has obvious evolutionary benefits, and as a side effect it gives us the ability to reflect on the world. There are other faculties that we miss, that might also have interesting side effects (e.g. magnetoreception), but based on the size of the achievements of the human race, language is more important.
The thing that always strikes me as interesting about the evolution of intelligence is that it's a mostly unnecessary latecomer to the evolutionary party: plenty of things thrive in nature without anything even remotely resembling human intelligence, even plenty of large animals that function quite well in complex environments rely mostly on hard coded "unintelligent" systems in their brains.
The fact is, most of the problems that need to be solved to survive and reproduce can be solved very effectively without much general intelligence. Sure, once evolution discovers intelligence it turns out to be a very efficient way to implement a lot of functionality that would otherwise need to be hard coded, but it's not strictly necessary, and nature did just fine without it for a long time.
The good news: that also means that it's unlikely that significant evolutionary pressures went into designing the complex systems responsible for intelligent thought, so they were probably accidentally "designed" via random drift. If you think about that, given the complexity of the algorithms involved, it means that the algorithm space at that level complexity is probably fairly dense with algorithms that function intelligently (where by "fairly dense" I mean that it's a lot denser than we might assume otherwise, and the solution that evolution came up with is probably not the only possible one).
That means if we ever figure out how to do a guided search through algorithms of the right complexity in the right way, we may yet stand a chance of "accidentally" discovering intelligence rather than deliberately designing it.