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Ideas abound in philosophical musings, political discourse, and hypothetical scenarios, but to be practically useful and sustainable, they need to be generated and developed while mindful of three important constraints. In decreasing order of their fundamental nature and increasing order of social realities, these constraints are: physical, evolutionary, and economic.
1. Physical Constraints
A few years back, the philosopher of mind David Chalmers was discussing with inventor Ray Kurzweil about what it would take to build an artificial intelligence more capable than a human. Chalmers offered the creation of a computer simulation that would mimic the retracing of evolution from the very beginnings of life, complete with physical environment and the flora and fauna, that could “simply” be sped up to reproduce a superintelligence. Kurzweil, first and foremost an inventor and engineer before a philosopher, immediately pointed out the crucial flaw in this idea, which was that any simulation would require massive amounts of energy for the computations involved, so much so that even coming close to the practical implementation was a non-starter.
I’d like to further add that world that unfolded over the past few billion leading to the evolution of human intelligence was the fastest…
