11. This report concludes that a computer costing ~$10,000 today has enough computational power (10^14 FLOP/s, a measure of computational power) to be within 1⁄10 of the author’s best guess at what it would take to replicate the input-output behavior of a human brain (10^15 FLOP/s). If we take the author’s high-end estimate rather than best guess, it is about 10 million times as much computation (10^22 FLOP/s), which would presumably cost $1 trillion today—probably too high to be worth it, but computing is still getting cheaper. It’s possible that replicating the input-output behavior alone wouldn’t be enough detail to attain “consciousness,” though I’d guess it would be, and either way it would be sufficient for the productivity and social science consequences. ↩
11. This report concludes that a computer costing ~$10,000 today has enough computational power (10^14 FLOP/s, a measure of computational power) to be within 1⁄10 of the author’s best guess at what it would take to replicate the input-output behavior of a human brain (10^15 FLOP/s). If we take the author’s high-end estimate rather than best guess, it is about 10 million times as much computation (10^22 FLOP/s), which would presumably cost $1 trillion today—probably too high to be worth it, but computing is still getting cheaper. It’s possible that replicating the input-output behavior alone wouldn’t be enough detail to attain “consciousness,” though I’d guess it would be, and either way it would be sufficient for the productivity and social science consequences. ↩