If that is what AGI looks like.
There may well be an upper limit on cognition (we are not really sure what cognition is - even as we do it) and it may be that human minds are close to it.
There may well be an upper limit on cognition (we are not really sure what cognition is - even as we do it) and it may be that human minds are close to it.
But I agree, there’s no reason to believe humans are the universal limit on cognitive abilities
Especially if you are willing to pay a lot for active cooling with eg liquid helium.
Energy may be a constraint, it may not. What we do not know is likely to matter more than what we do
But: you can still run more of these systems in parallel, and you can still try to increase processing speeds.
Signals in the human brain travel, at best, roughly at the speed of sound. Electronic signals in computers play in the same league as the speed of light.
Human IO is optimised for surviving in the wild. We are really bad at taking in symbolic information (compared to a computer) and our memory is also really bad for that. A computer system that's only as smart as a human but has instant access to all the information of the Internet and to a calculator and to writing and running code, can already be effectively act much smarter than a human.
Our reading speed is not limited by our talking speed, and can be a bit faster.
And that's even more true, if you go beyond words: seeing someone do something can be a lot faster way to learn than just reading about it.
But even there, the IO speed is severely limited, and you can only transmit very specific kinds of information.