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On the other hand, mechanical devices are massively stronger than the strongest living animal. Metal and composite materials are wildly stronger than bone. Whee
by matthewdgreen 1y ago
On the other hand, mechanical devices are massively stronger than the strongest living animal. Metal and composite materials are wildly stronger than bone. Wheeled vehicles and planes move faster than the fastest cheetah or falcon. There are a small number of exceptions where biology-derived materials strictly outperform our best synthetic alternatives, but generally speaking we’ve outperformed in every other area. It wouldn’t surprise me if non-biological materials ultimately beat out biological neurons.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoThis seems trivially obvious and also "so what?". Of course non-biological materials beat out biological ones in a lot of ways. They don't get tired, they are impossibly strong, whatever else. We already have machines that do the jobs of many people, with only a single human operator. Think of a simple excavator. Using it, a single human can move more dirt per hour than dozens of people with shovels possibly could. Arguably the human pilot is operating as a stand-in for the machines "brain"
- matthewdgreen 1y agoThe "so what" is that we already have hundreds of examples of places where biological materials find an amazing balance within whatever energy/cost/resource-availability envelope they were evolved in -- but where artificial materials (perhaps outside that energy/resource envelope) have proven to be hugely superior. I'm just hypothesizing that there's no reason to believe that biological computation will prove to be the exception.