The upshot is that the computational resources required to simply replicate the relevant evolutionary processes on Earth that produced human-level intelligence are severely out of reach—and will remain so even if Moore’s law were to continue for a century (cf. Figure 3). It is plausible, however, that compared with brute-force replication of natural evolutionary processes, vast efficiency gains are achievable by designing the search process to aim for intelligence, using various obvious improvements over natural selection.
