Intelligence (Complex Behavior and Adaptability) Cannot Be Designed Top Down

The typical tech and scientific understanding of intelligence is something capable of prediction and control.

Beneficial Forms and Systems

The ability to definitely observe, predict and then control behavior and/or the environment.

That concept as the basis of intelligence design will not lead anywhere but to more misunderstood experiments and engineering. But it will continue. And the effects will be as chaotic and emergent as dropping the whole intelligence as a thing assumption.

I would argue that more interesting, sometimes useful, and few times beneficial forms and systems and creatures would come from our shared (the collective work of scientists artists and makers) embracing that simplicity of form and emergent adaptability is the basis of complex behavior. That is, prediction and control are very limited in reach but selection by consequences over bazillions of relating simple forms is where the vast majority of phenomena actually exists.

As a species seeking various survival paths…. our target should be adaptability in the face of uncertainty, not more control. The directionality is flawed currently. We’re creating more and more fragile systems of increasing design complexity to encode all this “knowledge of the world” and not paying attention to the basic building blocks and their flow. We’re doing more and more data science of our instrumentation and less and less science of whatever physical reality might be out there. E.g. our techies are designing intelligence based on 1900s mind/body unrealities. And their data trails are measuring within that context.

a more fruitful approach is likely to just follow biology… create simple forms and let them interact, mutate and evolve by consequences. Do not design at all.

But again… even the design process people think they are doing is actually just farting around with simple forms… and watching. They don’t see it that way and over credit the design process and the data science.

But then again, maybe there is some intelligent design to it all or us humans will be the first to become god makers.