That’s a ridiculous idea

In the presence of radio waves coming from nearby PCs, a computer running an evolutionary algorithm manipulated the connectivity of a motherboard in order to amplify the ambient radio waves and thereby create an oscillating current (which was it’s goal).1 Receiving radio waves is a different project than transmitting them, and the task is certainly not trivial. The purpose of this example is not so much to suggest that this strategy would definitely work, but to give you the intuition that when a superintelligence is searching for means to an end, there is always another potential strategy that you haven’t thought of.

 

Back

 

  1. Bird, Jon, and Paul Layzell. “The evolved radio and its implications for modelling the evolution of novel sensors.” Evolutionary Computation, 2002. CEC’02. Proceedings of the 2002 Congress on. Vol. 2. IEEE, 2002. ↩