It’s hard to say. This CLR article lists some advantages that artificial systems have over humans. Also see this section of 80k’s interview with Richard Ngo:
Rob Wiblin: One other thing I’ve heard, that I’m not sure what the implication is: signals in the human brain — just because of limitations and the engineering of neurons and synapses and so on — tend to move pretty slowly through space, much less than the speed of electrons moving down a wire. So in a sense, our signal propagation is quite gradual and our reaction times are really slow compared to what computers can manage. Is that right?
Richard Ngo: That’s right. But I think this effect is probably a little overrated as a factor for overall intelligence differences between AIs and humans, just because it does take quite a long time to run a very large neural network. So if our neural networks just keep getting bigger at a significant pace, then it may be the case that for quite a while, most cutting-edge neural networks are actually going to take a pretty long time to go from the inputs to the outputs, just because you’re going to have to pass it through so many different neurons.
Rob Wiblin: Stages, so to speak.
Richard Ngo: Yeah, exactly. So I do expect that in the longer term there’s going to be a significant advantage for neural networks in terms of thinking time compared with the human brain. But it’s not actually clear how big that advantage is now or in the foreseeable future, just because it’s really hard to run a neural network with hundreds of billions of parameters on the types of chips that we have now or are going to have in the coming years.
How slow humans perception comparing to AI? Is it a pure difference of “signal speed of neurons” and “signal speed of copper/aluminum”?
It’s hard to say. This CLR article lists some advantages that artificial systems have over humans. Also see this section of 80k’s interview with Richard Ngo: