Nature needed 3.5 billion years to work it out, and we're going to solve it in a few decades?

kelseyfrog 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

It depends on where we draw the starting line. We're already at parity with 3.5BYA to 541Mya because no neurons existed in that duration. Only more recently, in the Cambrian, do we have evidence that voltage gated potassium signaling evolved[1].

That changes the calculus likely very little, but it feels more accurate.

1. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(16)30489...

▲

mathgeek 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know it’s a silly question to begin with, but if you analyze it seriously, you’d want to at most compare human intelligence->superintelligence with the 20 million years between the first homidinae and homo (and even that is probably too large for some folks to compare with).

One could even argue you should only compare it back to the discovery of writing or similar.

▲

Jyaif 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's not an argument. Nature never worked out going into space, yet we solved it in a few decades.

▲

jll29 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes but that's "in a few decades" ON TOP of millions of years.

If I had to give an estimate, I would consider less the time taken to date, but the current state of our knowledge of how the brain works, and how it has grown in the last decades. There is almost nothing that we know so little about as the human brain, how thoughts are represented, modern imaging techniques notwithstanding.

	▲	exe34 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Yes but that's "in a few decades" ON TOP of millions of years. If that's the bar, then anything else can fit in "a few decades", since that also rests "ON TOP of millions of years".

▲

SoftTalker 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It worked out flying though, millions of years before we did and we still don't do it as well. We can't even do walking as well as nature did.

	▲	baq 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Walking is easy compared to elbows, fingers and thumbs. It’s just falling over in a controlled fashion. I hear at least one company in Boston figured it out. Anyway, humanoid robots should be big in the next 10-20 years. The compute, the batteries, the algorithms are all coming together.
	▲	derektank 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We do flying better. If you adjust for our body weight, a modern airliner uses less energy per traveller mile than your average migratory bird. And the airliner goes much faster.

▲

gnz11 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

One could argue nature solved it by evolving homo sapiens.