Dwarkesh Patel: observation

Transcript context

…I love Nick Lane’s books. I was just listening to his podcast on the way up here. With respect to intelligence and its evolution, it’s very, very recent. I am surprised that it evolved. I find it fascinating to think about all the worlds out there. Say there’s a thousand planets like Earth and what they look like. I think Nick Lane was here talking about some of the earliest parts. He expects very similar life forms, roughly speaking, and bacteria-like things in most of them. There are a few breaks in there. The evolution of intelligence intuitively feels to me like it should be a fairly rare event. Maybe you should base it on how long something has existed. If bacteria were around for 2 billion years and nothing happened, then going to eukaryote is probably pretty hard because bacteria came up quite early in Earth’s evolution or history. How long have we had animals? Maybe a couple hundred million years, multicellular animals that run around, crawl, et cetera. That’s maybe 10% of Earth’s lifespan. Maybe on that timescale it’s not too tricky. It’s still surprising to me, intuitively, that it developed. I would maybe expect just a lot of animal-like life forms doing animal-like things. The fact that you can get something that creates culture and knowledge and accumulates it is surprising to me. There’s a couple of interesting follow-ups. If you buy the Sutton perspective that the crux of intelligence is animal intelligence… The quote he said is “If you got to the squirrel, you’d be most of the way to AGI. ” We got to squirrel intelligence right after the Cambrian explosion 600 million years ago. It seems like what instigated that was the oxygenation event 600 million years ago. But immediately the intelligence algorithm was there to make the squirrel intelligence. It’s suggestive that animal intelligence was like that. As soon as you had the oxygen in the environment, you had the eukaryote, you could just get the algorithm. Maybe it was an accident that evolution stumbled upon it so fast, but I don’t know if that suggests that at the end it’s going to be quite simple. It’s so hard to tell with any of this stuff. You can base it a bit on how long something has existed or how long it feels like something has been bottlenecked. Nick Lane is very good about describing this very apparent bottleneck in bacteria and archaea. For two billion years, nothing happened. There’s extreme diversity of biochemistry, and yet nothing grows to become animals. Two billion years. I don’t know that we’ve seen exactly that kind of an equivalent with animals and intelligence, to your point. We could also look at it with respect to how many times we think certain intelligence has individually sprung up.…

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