Do you think the human brain uses quantum computing? (It’s not obvious that human brain structure is any easier to replicate than quantum computing, and I haven’t thought about this at all, but it seems like an existence proof of a suitable “hardware”, and I’d weakly guess it doesn’t use QC)
The brain does not use quantum computing as far as I know. At least not in the sense that would be highly beneficial computationally. The brain achieves a compute density many orders of magnitude denser than any classical computer we will ever able to design at about 20 W of energy that is the primary advantage of the brain. We cannot build such a structure with silicon, because it would overheat. Even if we would be able to cool it (room temperature superconductors), there is no way to manufacture it. 3D memory is just a couple of layers extra but the yield is so bad that it is almost not economically viable to produce it because the manufacturing process is so unreliable. It is unlikely that we will able to manufacture it more reliably in the future because our tools are already very close to physical limits.
You might say “Why not just build a brain biologically?”. Well for that we would need to understand the brain at the protein level and how to coordinated proteins from scratch. From our tools it is unlikely that that will ever happen. You cannot measure a collection of tiny things that are closely bundled together when you need large instruments to measure the tiny things. There is just not enough space, geometrically, to do that. And there are more problems after you understood how the brain works on the protein level. I think efficient biological computation it is just not a physically plausible concept.
With those two eliminated there is just not a way to replicate a human brain. There are different ways to achieve super-human compute capabilities by exploiting some physical dimensions which are limited for brains but such an intelligence would be very different from a human talent. Maybe superior in many aspects, but not AGI in the general sense.
Do you think the human brain uses quantum computing? (It’s not obvious that human brain structure is any easier to replicate than quantum computing, and I haven’t thought about this at all, but it seems like an existence proof of a suitable “hardware”, and I’d weakly guess it doesn’t use QC)
The brain does not use quantum computing as far as I know. At least not in the sense that would be highly beneficial computationally. The brain achieves a compute density many orders of magnitude denser than any classical computer we will ever able to design at about 20 W of energy that is the primary advantage of the brain. We cannot build such a structure with silicon, because it would overheat. Even if we would be able to cool it (room temperature superconductors), there is no way to manufacture it. 3D memory is just a couple of layers extra but the yield is so bad that it is almost not economically viable to produce it because the manufacturing process is so unreliable. It is unlikely that we will able to manufacture it more reliably in the future because our tools are already very close to physical limits.
You might say “Why not just build a brain biologically?”. Well for that we would need to understand the brain at the protein level and how to coordinated proteins from scratch. From our tools it is unlikely that that will ever happen. You cannot measure a collection of tiny things that are closely bundled together when you need large instruments to measure the tiny things. There is just not enough space, geometrically, to do that. And there are more problems after you understood how the brain works on the protein level. I think efficient biological computation it is just not a physically plausible concept.
With those two eliminated there is just not a way to replicate a human brain. There are different ways to achieve super-human compute capabilities by exploiting some physical dimensions which are limited for brains but such an intelligence would be very different from a human talent. Maybe superior in many aspects, but not AGI in the general sense.