>it seems presumptuous to believe that humans will suddenly figure out a way to do the same thing a trillion times more efficiently.
Nature isn't efficient. Humans create things many orders of magnitude more efficient than nature as a matter of course. The fact that it didn't take millions of years to develop even the primitive AI we have today is evidence enough, or to go from the Wright Brothers' flight to space travel. Or any number of examples from medicine, genetic engineering, material synthesis, etc.
You could say that any human example also has to account for the entirety of human evolution, but that would be a bit of a red herring since even in that case the examples of humans being able to improve upon nature within relatively less than geological spans of time are valid, and that case would apply to the development of AI as well.
Nature isn't efficient. Humans create things many orders of magnitude more efficient than nature as a matter of course. The fact that it didn't take millions of years to develop even the primitive AI we have today is evidence enough, or to go from the Wright Brothers' flight to space travel. Or any number of examples from medicine, genetic engineering, material synthesis, etc.
You could say that any human example also has to account for the entirety of human evolution, but that would be a bit of a red herring since even in that case the examples of humans being able to improve upon nature within relatively less than geological spans of time are valid, and that case would apply to the development of AI as well.