Might an open-ended process of emergent selection in complex environments mitigate the greatest practical challenges of ML/AI?
Note that we have only a vague idea of our denominator, we have a privileged vantage point of one of an unkown number of "runs" of evolution that it took to generate the diversity and complexity of Earth.
Note that generating new worlds and evolving intelligent beings deserves critical ethical consideration:
"What I regret most is my uncritical treatment of the idea of allowing intelligent life to evolve in the Autoverse. Sure, this is a common science-fictional idea, but when I thought about it properly (some years after the book was published), I realised that anyone who actually did this would have to be utterly morally bankrupt. To get from micro-organisms to intelligent life this way would involve an immense amount of suffering, with billions of sentient creatures living, struggling and dying along the way. Yes, this happened to our own ancestors, but that doesn’t give us the right to inflict the same kind of suffering on anyone else."
- Greg Egan on the Autoverse in Permutation City (from his website). See his story Crystal Nights for a more explicit treatment of the idea.
Additional examples
Patterns emerging from the blue gliders take on different forms, and both "nucleate" dynamic green patterns.download (mp4)
A few new forms emerge, including a rgb hopping puffer that generate green/red gliders.download (mp4)
This example demonstrates 3 phase changes in the background environment.download (mp4)