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Comment by levitate | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, I don't know how much of that huge input is stored for very long. Human brains are incredible at discarding unimportant information by generalizing information into broad ideas and emotions. Just think back to something that happened a few years ago and try to recall specific details.

Being able to identify and discard unneeded data in realtime seems like a huge step for AI that hasn't been really implemented yet.

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Humans are EXTREMELY more energy efficient than computers; an adult human operates at something like 100 Watts on average (much less for children, of course), and that covers not only all of our mental processing, but also all of our physical movement, digestion, tissue regeneration/repair, etc.

At no point in our evolutionary history have we had the leisure to absorb the vast quantities of energy that AI supercomputers can. I think this probably has a lot to do with why we are so effective at learning on little data; even when large quantities of data are available, it seems we may not have the energy to take it on board. We ignore and forget most of it.

Maybe if we made a real effort to develop energy efficient AI, that design limitation would help us develop AI that requires far less training data.

Maybe that discarding process and the time it takes to learn it from a combination of so many different senses is the key to developing a human mind to the level of intelligence that it is/has.

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