5 ms·

Close to the limit of how smart it's possible to be? Don't be silly. The human brain is limited by its slow speed, by the amount of cortical mass you can fit in

Close to the limit of how smart it's possible to be? Don't be silly. The human brain is limited by its slow speed, by the amount of cortical mass you can fit inside a human skull, and by the length of human lifetimes. Computers will not have any of those limitations. In terms of speed: if you could build the exact silicon equivalent of a human brain, you may be able to run it several orders of magnitude faster, simply because it wouldn't be limited by the slow speeds of electrochemical processes in the human brain. Nerve impulses travel at speeds measured in meters per second. Neurons also need time to recharge between spike bursts, and they can physically damage themselves if they get too excited. In terms of volume: much of our intelligence is in perceiving patterns. That's limited by cortical mass. Pattern recognition is what all these "deep learning" systems excel at. The more depth they add, the better they get. Having deeper pattern recognizers, or simply having more of them, means you can see more patterns, more complex patterns, etc. Things that might be beyond the reach of any human. Then, in terms of data, machine have an advantage too. We're limited by our short lifetimes. How many people are expert musicians, genius mathematicians, rockstar programmers and great cooks? Very few. There's only so many hours in a day, and we only live so long. A machine could learn all those skills, and more. It could excel at everything. Speak every language, master every skill, be aware of so many more facts. And finally, I posit that maybe we, humans, are limited in our ability to grasp complex conceptual relationships. If you think about it, the average person can fit 7-8 items in their short-term memory, in their brain's "registers", so to speak. That probably limits our ability to reason by analogy. We can go "A is to B what C is to D", but maybe more complex relationships with 50 variables and several logical connectives will seem "intuitive" to a machine that can manipulate 200 items in its short-term memory.

mindcrime 11y ago
The human brain is limited by its slow speed, by the amount of cortical mass you can fit inside a human skull, and by the length of human lifetimes. Computers will not have any of those limitations. Right, but the idea I'm playing around with is this: Suppose you had a hypothetical creature with a brain 20x as fast as the human brain and with twice the volume. How much smarter would that creature be in practice. It's kind of an abstract idea (and I probably don't fully understand it myself), but I'm getting at something like "is there a point where that additional raw computing power just doesn't buy you anything meaningful" at least in terms of "does it represent an existential threat?" or "does the nuclear analogy hold?"
- cfcef 11y ago
  You could try looking at existing animal neural counts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... Doublings or 20xing get you a long way: a 1/20x cerebral cortex neural count decrease takes you from human to... horse. I like horses a lot, but there's clearly a very wide gulf in capabilities, and I don't like the thought of ever encountering someone who is to us as we are to horses.
  - Chathamization 11y ago
    I don't know. If you dropped a human infant into a den of bears (more or less the equivalent situation), I don't think it would be the bears who would be at a disadvantage. So even if we were able to create an AI as far above us as we are above bears (a pretty huge if), it hardly seems certain that it would suddenly (or ever) dominate us.
    - lmm 11y ago
      But we do dominate bears. They continue to exist only at our sufferance; we tolerate them for the most part (though we kill them quickly if they ever threaten us), but we could wipe them out easily if we wanted to. We probably won't do it deliberately, but we drive a number of species to extinction if they're in the way of resource extraction by us - there are estimates that 20% of extant species will go extinct as a result of human activity, and that's with us deliberately trying not to cause extinctions! (There are more technical arguments that an AI's values would be unlikely to be the complex mismash that human values are, so such an AI would be very unlikely to share our sentimental desire to not make species extinct)
      - Chathamization 11y ago
        But that's the point. A human society dominates bears. But a solitary human, raised by bears, wouldn't dominate them. So to assume that a single that a solitary AI, "raised" by humans, would somehow be able to conquer us a pretty problematic assumption (on top of a string of other pretty problematic assumptions).
deleted 11y ago
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mindcrime 11y ago

The human brain is limited by its slow speed, by the amount of cortical mass you can fit inside a human skull, and by the length of human lifetimes. Computers will not have any of those limitations. Right, but the idea I'm playing around with is this: Suppose you had a hypothetical creature with a brain 20x as fast as the human brain and with twice the volume. How much smarter would that creature be in practice. It's kind of an abstract idea (and I probably don't fully understand it myself), but I'm getting at something like "is there a point where that additional raw computing power just doesn't buy you anything meaningful" at least in terms of "does it represent an existential threat?" or "does the nuclear analogy hold?"

cfcef 11y ago
You could try looking at existing animal neural counts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... Doublings or 20xing get you a long way: a 1/20x cerebral cortex neural count decrease takes you from human to... horse. I like horses a lot, but there's clearly a very wide gulf in capabilities, and I don't like the thought of ever encountering someone who is to us as we are to horses.
- Chathamization 11y ago
  I don't know. If you dropped a human infant into a den of bears (more or less the equivalent situation), I don't think it would be the bears who would be at a disadvantage. So even if we were able to create an AI as far above us as we are above bears (a pretty huge if), it hardly seems certain that it would suddenly (or ever) dominate us.
  - lmm 11y ago
    But we do dominate bears. They continue to exist only at our sufferance; we tolerate them for the most part (though we kill them quickly if they ever threaten us), but we could wipe them out easily if we wanted to. We probably won't do it deliberately, but we drive a number of species to extinction if they're in the way of resource extraction by us - there are estimates that 20% of extant species will go extinct as a result of human activity, and that's with us deliberately trying not to cause extinctions! (There are more technical arguments that an AI's values would be unlikely to be the complex mismash that human values are, so such an AI would be very unlikely to share our sentimental desire to not make species extinct)
    - Chathamization 11y ago
      But that's the point. A human society dominates bears. But a solitary human, raised by bears, wouldn't dominate them. So to assume that a single that a solitary AI, "raised" by humans, would somehow be able to conquer us a pretty problematic assumption (on top of a string of other pretty problematic assumptions).

deleted 11y ago

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