However, witnessing the rapid evolution of AI with just a few hundred GPUs, enough data, and power, I no longer wonder what a billion years of feedback loops and randomness can achieve.
Take humans, for example. You can block your trachea and die through the simple act of eating. An intelligent (and omniscient) designer could have avoided that by better designing our overall our overall structure.
Or take the fact or ear bones are modified jaw bones. Or if you believe in intelligent design, ask why our intelligent designer thought it wise to link our jaw to our ears so that it’s hard to hear things when you’re chewing.
The examples you quote do look like a problem today, but I think they must have worked to some benefit to bring us here.
If anything, your optimal design is just another mutation that may or may not survive time.
Of course you can. We could regenerate limbs like a lizard’s tail, keep growing teeth like a shark, not require so many different types of foods to survive healthily… The list goes on and on.
I disagree, evolution is not perfect nor intelligent (as far as we know). It's never the "best design" that survives, it's always "good enough for now", merely better than other solutions at the time. A billion years of good enough is not necessarily the best it can be theoretically.
I'm sure we can find examples of living processes that are dumb and inefficient, with obvious room for improvement, but have survived for millenia simply because it was good enough.
The fact that conditions change doesn’t make your current form ideal.
Speaking of conditions.
In 5 billion years there will be no need for natural selection cause Earth will dip into the exploding Sun and evolution game will be over. Nothing will keep working. Even in 1B years it will be pretty hot outside. We’ll have no time for that “optimal” crap anymore, starting now tbh, considering our stupid tribal nature and the complexity of overcoming it.
Btw, if we fail to continue our current civilization, there will be no another civilization, cause we’ve drained all under-your-feet resources long ago. The next civilization will be forever farmers slowly burned by a star.
We absolutely can escape this fate by finding something much better than a bare minimum.
Edit: messed up numbers, fixed