Yes, agreed. Nothing I said above contradicts that! :-)
> Humans don't need to read through 40 GB of text multiple times to learn to write.
Yes, that's true... but to keep the comparison fair, note that we do need many years of schooling to learn to read, say, at a high-school or college level. And before learning to read, we first must learn to speak, which surely helps. And we also get to inhabit bodies that see, smell, touch, and interact with the physical objects that we read and speak about during our formative years, which also helps. The more one thinks about it, 40GB of data is actually a tiny figure in comparison to the amount of training data that flows continuously to our brain from all senses. I think I read once that our brains process on the order of 10 to 100 GB of training data per second.
A human will also be learning vision, hearing, walking, physics, causal reasoning, and much more. This comparison just isn't well grounded. Task specific is how much training does a young brain require to learn to produce language? If the brain comes with innate advantages then rather than be resort to inefficiency and excusing our models, we should try to see if they can be bettered.
How do you estimate the effective (digital) bitrate of an inherently analogue system?
Then yes, it's enough to write text that nobody really cares about and that could cover a lot of what we read.
4 gigs then would be 1,600,000 pages.
That's 219 single-spaced pages per day every single day for 20 years straight. High, but I guess not outside the realm of possibility depending on the complexity of the text.
I'd've easily doubled or tripled that over the summer as a teenager.
/tautology