"You might as well argue that since heavier-than-air-flight is a search problem over an effectively infinite, high-dimensional landscape of possible machines - and that since it took evolution billions of years to produce birds, we have little chance of stumbling upon a working design for a wing."
Tired analogies between AI and flight are dead-ends. Until we have identified AI-side components of the analogy that corresponds to "air", "wing", "lift" &c., the analogy is empty and unproductive.
IOW these analogies neither get us off the ground nor do they take us anywhere.
I'm not making an analogy between AI and flight, I'm refuting an analogy between 'evolving' and 'inventing' solutions using flight as a counterexample.
Unfortunately, in doing so you have used the "AI is analogous to heavier-than-air-flight" meme. Please discard it, it's an albatross to discussion. Or to be more precise, it is a lead balloon - it never gets off the ground; it's a red herring. IOW you've chosen a poor and annoyingly wrongheaded counterexample. Now try and digest that.
If you use an argument and someone provides a single counter example, then your argument is false. That's it.
You can continue arguing your conclusion or view, but you need to find another argument to support it.
The fact that humans could invent super-flight despite not being able to build a bird means that the argument that we cannot build a super intelligent machine because we don't yet know how to make ourselves biologically more intelligent, is not a good argument.
Tired analogies between AI and flight are dead-ends. Until we have identified AI-side components of the analogy that corresponds to "air", "wing", "lift" &c., the analogy is empty and unproductive.
IOW these analogies neither get us off the ground nor do they take us anywhere.
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