Evolution "Doesn't Need" Mutation - Blaise Agüera y Arcas

"uh, von Neumann's update to Turing's thinking about computation. Which he did a few years later. This was published posthumously after von Neumann died. But the idea behind, behind von Neumann's thinking is he was trying to answer the same question that Schrödinger had asked in his "What Is Life?" book. And in particular, he was trying to ask the question, if you have a robot that is swimming around on a, you know, in a pond, and the pond has lots of loose Legos around— there were no— I don't know if there were Legos in 1950, but let's pretend there were Legos in 1950. And the job of the robot is to assemble those Legos into a new robot like itself. You know, there's something a little bit mysterious about that. It feels a little bit like pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, or like a paradox. And so he asked, what does it take for something to be able to make something like itself, uh, which seems, uh, hard, almost paradoxical? And his conclusion was, well, you need to have instructions for how to make a me."