Monday, October 11, 2021
Sewell hits a huge point
I need to interrupt my ceaseless point-missing-finding expedition to note an extremely sharp BULLSEYE by Granville Sewell.
He demolishes a common AI myth with a perfectly simple bit of logic that SHOULD be obvious. But it's not obvious to anyone else. It wasn't obvious to me. I never noticed the problem.
In a post here (“The First ‘Simple’ Self-Replicator?”), I tried to explain why self-replicating machines are so far beyond current human technology, by imagining trying to design something as “simple” as a self-replicating cardboard box. Take an empty cardboard box, I said, and build a completely automated factory inside which can produce empty cardboard boxes. The factory would, I presume, at least need to have some metal parts to cut and fold the cardboard and a motor with a battery to power these parts. But since the box now only builds empty boxes, it is not a self-replicator. So we would need to add another factory that could automatically produce a box with an empty box-building factory inside, and that factory would be enormously more complicated. But this box is still not a self-replicator because the box it builds can only build empty boxes, so now we need to add more technology to build a factory that builds the empty box-building factory, and then…. All of this ignores, of course, the very difficult question of where the box gets the cardboard and metals and other raw materials needed to supply its factories.In fact we've had fully automatic box-making machines for at least 100 years, long before computers. What we don't have, and absolutely CAN'T have, is an infinite regress of box-making machine-making machine-making machine-making machine-making .... The resource problem is outside of the infinite regress, and thus not PERFECTLY unsolvable. We have never developed a machine that seeks and extracts water and minerals and sunlight, and assembles a new machine with the full capacity to assemble more machines. Plants do it all the time. This resource extraction mechanism is at least conceivable, not perfectly logically impossible.
Labels: Not AI point-missing
¶ 12:03 PM
