One in the far but not unimaginably distant future, our descendants will wonder and marvel that we ever got by without genetic algorithms that lead to evolved AIs.

“How did they have time to do anything?” they will ask.

Much as we ask the same about a time before washing machines, vacuum cleaners and rapid forms of transportation.

I doubt it is possible to create an AI, but I think it is possible to create the conditions for one to evolve. That is inevitable, and not too far away I think.

My grandfather grew up in southern Georgia. He was old enough to remember when south Georgia and North Florida were much wilder places than they are now. Fishing in modern Florida is not bad, but he could recall when fish were so plentiful in the rivers and lakes that the moment you threw in a scrap of bait, multiple fish competed wildly for it.

Then, you could catch as many fish as many times as you cared to toss your line in.

Hearing stories about such abundance, I used to not believe them. I thought they were all “back in my day…” sort of tales, but turns out that ridiculous fecundity is supported by the academic research. In non-marginal areas wildlife was absolutely plentiful, such that those hunter-gatherers who lived there – assuming they lived past childhood – had relatively easy lives compared to what we have today.

Meaning, that is, they had a lot of leisure time. Leisure time is easy to obtain if catching your next meal is as simple as dipping a basket in the water and there are so many fish that a few just end up in there. That world seems insane today, but for hundreds of thousands of years of human history for most people, that is the world they experienced.

Not that I believe that being a hunter-gatherer was great. No. Personally I like my big-ass monitor and my GTO. I don’t want to be rid of those things. But with the trade-off that most people in the world I know spend most of their time working, with little hope of retirement coincident with decreasing living standards and climate change-induced environmental calamity on the way, the life of a hunter-gatherer doesn’t seem all that bad sometimes.