The human brain is a rather unusual kind of computer. It’s incredibly highly parallellised, but the individual processing units are really slow. It’s also not really a general purpose machine—nearly all of it is hardware optimised to the problem of deciding what to do in real time—in most respects it’s a slow machine optimised to act as fast as possible—and that implies lots of specialised circuitry. It may not be a very good general purpose computer at all.
Add to this the fact that its function as a general purpose thinking module is apparently very recent—only the last 100k years or so—and that our logical faculties are generally slow, error prone and so forth. Although humans are smarter than other creatures, we are, for general purpose thinking, in evolutionary terms, only just past the point of not being completely useless, as chimpanzees essentially are. We are perhaps a bit like the mudskipper—the first to crawl ashore on the land of “general purpose intelligence”—and it would be unsafe to assume that something couldn’t exist that could run much faster.
Perhaps when you have an inherently faster machine that’s not required to do so much specialised high speed stuff, it may be possible to do spectacularly better. Perhaps all we are missing is a better algorithm.
I think it might well occur rather suddenly.
The human brain is a rather unusual kind of computer. It’s incredibly highly parallellised, but the individual processing units are really slow. It’s also not really a general purpose machine—nearly all of it is hardware optimised to the problem of deciding what to do in real time—in most respects it’s a slow machine optimised to act as fast as possible—and that implies lots of specialised circuitry. It may not be a very good general purpose computer at all.
Add to this the fact that its function as a general purpose thinking module is apparently very recent—only the last 100k years or so—and that our logical faculties are generally slow, error prone and so forth. Although humans are smarter than other creatures, we are, for general purpose thinking, in evolutionary terms, only just past the point of not being completely useless, as chimpanzees essentially are. We are perhaps a bit like the mudskipper—the first to crawl ashore on the land of “general purpose intelligence”—and it would be unsafe to assume that something couldn’t exist that could run much faster.
Perhaps when you have an inherently faster machine that’s not required to do so much specialised high speed stuff, it may be possible to do spectacularly better. Perhaps all we are missing is a better algorithm.
All in all I suspect a Foom is quite likely.