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Comment by adamsmith143 | Hacker News Reader

Lot of problems with your analysis. One is that you assume the brain is the most efficient way to generate intelligence. There doesn't seem to be any reason to make that assumption and it may be that von Neumann architectures are thousands or milions of times more efficient at that task.

Another is that Neurons are incredibly slow. Lets say you can make a machine only half as intelligent as a Human but that can think 1 Million times faster, this is even a lowball since a neuron can fire at like 1Hz and modern CPUs operate in the GHz range.

>In all likelihood we are never going to create a server with a whole city of intelligences in it, ever.

Think this is a really bad take. If one assumes even a .1% improvement in "Machine Intelligence" per unit time then it is literally only a matter of time until you reach Human level and then pass it.

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> a neuron can fire at like 1Hz and modern CPUs operate in the GHz range.

This comparison doesn't make much sense - computers have a very small number of cores, let's say 10, and brains have 86 billion neurons. 86 billion things operating at 1Hz is also in the GHz range. This is leaving aside the issue that a CPU cycle and a neuron firing are doing completely different sorts of work - comparing them is kind of nonsensical in the first place.

I mean a modern CPU has something like 5 Billion transistors and these are switching at GHz range so its many orders of magnitude more than neurons can achieve. 10^9x10^9 >> 86x10^9 Number of cores doesn't seem relevant.

>This is leaving aside the issue that a CPU cycle and a neuron firing are doing completely different sorts of work - comparing them is kind of nonsensical in the first place.

Maybe, but the op comment was explicitly using raw transistor count to compare to Neuron count as a proxy for sapience.

If one assumes even a .1% improvement in "Machine Intelligence" per unit time then it is literally only a matter of time until you reach Human level and then pass it.

That's like saying "even if there's only a 0.1% improvement in materials strength per unit time eventually we'll have structures strong enough to bounce off an incoming rogue planet." There is an upper bound to computational performance per unit mass and unit energy. We're nowhere near it but it is there, lurking.

The problem is assuming the upper bound is close or at human level for intelligence. There's no reason to think that and clearly outlier humans like John von Neumann that are still in the Human range are far more capable than the average person. If you only could make machines as intelligent as that it would still be revolutionary.

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