  Humans have created artificial intelligence (AI), not the other way around.
This statement is deceptively obvious. In this note, we decided to challenge
this statement as a small, lighthearted Gedankenexperiment. We ask a simple
question: in a world driven by evolution by natural selection, would neural
networks or humans be likely to evolve first? We compare the
Solomonoff--Kolmogorov--Chaitin complexity of the two and find neural networks
(even LLMs) to be significantly simpler than humans. Further, we claim that it
is unnecessary for any complex human-made equipment to exist for there to be
neural networks. Neural networks may have evolved as naturally occurring
objects before humans did as a form of chemical reaction-based or enzyme-based
computation. Now that we know that neural networks can pass the Turing test and
suspect that they may be capable of superintelligence, we ask whether the
natural evolution of neural networks could lead from pure evolution by natural
selection to what we call evolution-bootstrapped simulation. The evolution of
neural networks does not involve irreducible complexity; would easily allow
irreducible complexity to exist in the evolution-bootstrapped simulation; is a
falsifiable scientific hypothesis; and is independent of / orthogonal to the
issue of intelligent design.
