Read Online The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ray Kurzweil
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evaluated for retention by survival of the entire organism and its ability to reproduce. Yet the genetic program controls not just the one characteristic being “experimented” with, but millions of other features as well. Survival of the fittest appears to be a crude technique capable of concentrating on one or at most a few characteristics at a time. Since the vast majority of changes make things worse, it may seem surprising that this technique works at all.
. This contrasts with the conventional human approach to computer programming in which changes are designed with a purpose in mind, multiple changes may be introduced at a time, and the changes made are tested by focusing in on each change, rather than by overall survival of the program. If we attempted to improve our computer programs the way that evolution apparently improves its design, our programs would collapse from increasing randomness.
It is remarkable that by concentrating on one refinement at a time, such elaborate structures as the human eye could have been designed. Some observers have postulated that such intricate design is impossible through the incremental-refinement method that evolution uses. A design as intricate as the eye or the heart would appear to require a design methodology in which it was designed all at once.
However, the fact that designs such as the eye have many interacting aspects does not rule out its creation through a design path comprising one small refinement at a time. In utero, the human fetus appears to go through a process of evolution, although whether this is a corollary of the phases of evolution that led to our subspecies is not universally accepted. Nonetheless, most medical students learn that ontogeny (fetal development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolution of a genetically related group of organisms, such as a phylum). We appear to start out in the womb with similarities to a fish embryo, progress to an amphibian, then a mammal, and so on. Regardless of the phylogeny controversy, we can see in the history of evolution the intermediate design drafts that evolution went through in designing apparently “complete” mechanisms such as the human eye. Even though evolution focuses on just one issue at a time, it is indeed capable of creating striking designs with many interacting parts.
There is a disadvantage, however, to evolution’s incremental method of design : It can’t easily perform complete redesigns. It is stuck, for example, with the very slow computing speed of the mammalian neuron. But there is a way around this, as we will explore in chapter 6, “Building New Brains.”
The Evolution of Evolution
There are also certain ways in which evolution has evolved its own means for evolution. The DNA-based coding itself is clearly one such means. Within the code, other means have developed. Certain design elements, such as the shape of the eye, are coded in a way that makes mutations less likely The error detection and correction mechanisms built into the DNA-based coding make changes in these regions very unlikely This enforcement of design integrity for certain critical features evolved because they provide an advantage—changes to these characteristics are usually catastrophic. Other design elements, such as the number and layout of light-sensitive rods and cones in the retina, have fewer design enforcements built into the code. If we examine the evolutionary record, we do see more recent change in the layout of the retina than in the shape of the eyeball itself. So in certain ways, the strategies of evolution have evolved. The Law of Accelerating Returns says that it should, for evolving its own strategies is the primary way that an evolutionary process builds on itself.
By simulating evolution, we can also confirm the ability of evolution’s “one step at a time” design process to build ingenious designs of many interacting elements. One example is a software simulation of the evolution of
. This contrasts with the conventional human approach to computer programming in which changes are designed with a purpose in mind, multiple changes may be introduced at a time, and the changes made are tested by focusing in on each change, rather than by overall survival of the program. If we attempted to improve our computer programs the way that evolution apparently improves its design, our programs would collapse from increasing randomness.
It is remarkable that by concentrating on one refinement at a time, such elaborate structures as the human eye could have been designed. Some observers have postulated that such intricate design is impossible through the incremental-refinement method that evolution uses. A design as intricate as the eye or the heart would appear to require a design methodology in which it was designed all at once.
However, the fact that designs such as the eye have many interacting aspects does not rule out its creation through a design path comprising one small refinement at a time. In utero, the human fetus appears to go through a process of evolution, although whether this is a corollary of the phases of evolution that led to our subspecies is not universally accepted. Nonetheless, most medical students learn that ontogeny (fetal development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolution of a genetically related group of organisms, such as a phylum). We appear to start out in the womb with similarities to a fish embryo, progress to an amphibian, then a mammal, and so on. Regardless of the phylogeny controversy, we can see in the history of evolution the intermediate design drafts that evolution went through in designing apparently “complete” mechanisms such as the human eye. Even though evolution focuses on just one issue at a time, it is indeed capable of creating striking designs with many interacting parts.
There is a disadvantage, however, to evolution’s incremental method of design : It can’t easily perform complete redesigns. It is stuck, for example, with the very slow computing speed of the mammalian neuron. But there is a way around this, as we will explore in chapter 6, “Building New Brains.”
The Evolution of Evolution
There are also certain ways in which evolution has evolved its own means for evolution. The DNA-based coding itself is clearly one such means. Within the code, other means have developed. Certain design elements, such as the shape of the eye, are coded in a way that makes mutations less likely The error detection and correction mechanisms built into the DNA-based coding make changes in these regions very unlikely This enforcement of design integrity for certain critical features evolved because they provide an advantage—changes to these characteristics are usually catastrophic. Other design elements, such as the number and layout of light-sensitive rods and cones in the retina, have fewer design enforcements built into the code. If we examine the evolutionary record, we do see more recent change in the layout of the retina than in the shape of the eyeball itself. So in certain ways, the strategies of evolution have evolved. The Law of Accelerating Returns says that it should, for evolving its own strategies is the primary way that an evolutionary process builds on itself.
By simulating evolution, we can also confirm the ability of evolution’s “one step at a time” design process to build ingenious designs of many interacting elements. One example is a software simulation of the evolution of
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