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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Series of absurd upgrades in nature's great search, published by Luke H Miles on September 3, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.

So you want to find that special thing that replicates best and lasts longest? Just vibrate a bunch of molecules a long time!

You might reasonably assume that molecules wouldn't practically ever randomly assemble themselves into anything worth looking at. It happens a bit differently instead:

Eventually, "solar systems" will form. Each one has an independent star (energy source) with several independent planets (experiment boxes) that vary in their temperature, mass, composition, etc dramatically. (Instead of just having a big homogenous soup throughout the universe with much less search power)

these planets will conveniently have "continents" sometimes to run more independent experiments on each one

A lipid layer boundary innovation thing leads to trillions of independent chemical experiments on some planets (instead of a big soup within each planet)

A general protein factory is discovered. Critically, it uses a simple and concise and robust physical encoding scheme. This allows good bubbles from step 2 to copy quickly and exactly, and clear out weak bubbles faster.

Very large multicellulared organisms make several search improvements: creatures can do sexual selection on each other instead of just getting random mutations; big smart fast predators can find & kill weak creatures quite effectively; parasites find weaknesses early & often. This all clears out weak replicators and leaves more room for the good ones.

Some creatures develop language and culture, which isn't generally much use, except that it one day allows them to design new replicators from scratch.

So you really can just vibrate sand and get out all kinds of things!

So when we talk about the power of nature's search, let's not forget the miraculousness and variety of techniques here. It's not just generations, mutations, generations, mutations...

Not mentioned above:

separate galaxies to limit damage of supernova

separate species to prevent sex from turning the creatures to big crab soup

give creatures limited lifespans to ensure they're actually good replicators and not just robust

Lots of ways that the independence & quantity & efficiency of experiments was scaled up in the box of sand. Don't turn any knobs, just keep vibrating the box and it makes its own knobs.

Makes me think about how many float16s we're vibrating in our GPUs these days and what kind of tiny planets and cells are forming inside. I imagine it's not a very hospitable environment. But most of space isn't either.

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