Evolution takes billions of years to learn, and the brain takes a lifetime. Culture is better: I can distill a lifetime of learning into a book, and you can read it in a few hours. But learning algorithms should be able to learn in minutes or seconds. He who learns fastest wins, whether it’s the Baldwin effect speeding up evolution, verbal communication speeding up human learning, or computers discovering patterns at the speed of light. Machine learning is the latest chapter in the arms race of life on Earth, and swifter hardware is only half the equation. The other half is smarter software.
