Jacob Kimmel: belief

Transcript context

…All right, first question. What's the first principles argument for why evolution just discards us so easily? I know evolution cares about our kids. But if we have longer, healthier lifespans, we can have more kids, right? We can care for them longer, we can care for our grandkids. Is there some pleiotropic effect that an anti-aging medicine would have which actually selects against you staying young for longer? I think there are a couple different ways one can tackle this. One is you have to think about what's the selective pressure that would make one live longer and encode for higher health over longer durations. Do you have that selective pressure present? There's another which is, are there any anti-selective pressures that are actually pushing against that? There's a third piece of this, which is something like the constraints of your optimizer. If we think about the genome as a set of parameters and the optimizer is natural selection, then you've got some constraints on how that actually works. You can only do so many mutations at a time. You have to spend your steps that update your genome in certain ways. Tackling those from a few different directions, what would the positive possible selection be? As you highlighted, it might be something like, “If I'm able to extend the lifespan of an individual, they can have more children, they can care for those children more effectively. That genome should propagate more readily into the population.” One of the challenges then—if you're trying to think back in a thought experiment style of evolutionary simulation here—would be: What were the conditions under which a person would actually live long enough for that phenotype to be selected for, and how often would that occur? This brings us back to some very hypothetical questions. Things like, what was the baseline hazard rate during the majority of human and primate evolution? The hazard rate is simply, “What is the likelihood you're going to die on any given day?” That integrates everything. That's diseases from aging, that's getting eaten by a tiger, that's falling off a cliff, that's scraping your foot on a rock and getting an infection and dying from that. From the best evidence we have, the baseline hazard rate was very, very high. Even absent aging, you're unlikely to actually reach those outer limits of possible health where aging is one of the main limitations. The number of individuals in the population that are going to make it later in that lifespan, where using some of your evolutionary updates to try and push your lifespan upward, is relatively limited. The amount of gradient signal flowing back to the genome then is not as high as one might intuitively think. On that, often people who are trying to forecast AI will discuss how hard evolution tried to optimize for intelligence, and what were the things which optimizing for intelligence would have prevented evolution from selecting for at the same time? So even if intelligence were a relatively easy thing to build in this universe, it would have taken evolution so long to get at human-level intelligence. And, potentially, if intelligence were really easy, then it might imply that we're going to get superintelligence and Jupiter-level intelligence, etc. The sky's the limit. One argument is birth canal sizes, etc., or the fact that we had to spend most of our resources on the immune system. But what you just hinted at is an independent argument that if you have this high hazard rate, that would imply you can't be a kid for too long. Kids die all the time and you have to become an adult so that you can have your kids.…

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